The Sevan Podcast - #294 - Graciano Rubio
Episode Date: February 9, 2022Graciano Rubio, "The Wall Street Weightlifter", is the owner of CrossFit Valley View, a financial advisor, a 105 kg strong man, and a husband and dad. "The Sevan Podcast" T-Shirts https://asrx.com/co...llections/the-real-sevan-podcast-collection Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/therealsevanpodcast/ Watch this episode https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC59b5GwfJN9HY7uhhCW-ACw/videos?view=2&live_view=503 Support the show Partners: https://cahormones.com/ - CODE "SEVAN" FOR FREE CONSULTATION https://www.paperstcoffee.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK! https://asrx.com/collections/the-real... - OUR TSHIRTS ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Bam. We're live.
Hey.
Hi. Good morning.
Good morning.
Oh, you got a red one of those?
Yeah.
I was looking when we first started working, when I first started doing the podcast with, hey, Graciano, good morning.
What's up, Savant?
Good morning.
Good morning, Saron.
Matt, when I first started doing the podcast with Fraser, fraser um o'keefe sent me a shitload of
uh hard work pays off shirts nice you know what i mean the hwpo ones yeah well i don't i can't
stand nike so i don't ever wear them like in public they've turned into my my nighttime shirt
i think it's just a shit company um i think they're bad guys but uh but they come in different colors so i was thinking
the sebon podcast shirt should come in different colors yeah for sure i think that once we get that
first one going we got a bunch of cool ideas colors exclusive designs or i should say limited runs my dms are filling with stuff um not does kotler look like the meme guy
the who the meme guy oh my best friend that um my dms are filling with screenshots of dms people
are having with him it's fucking amazing that's awesome he was great it's a great
conversation no not kotler the other guy hi graciana i i i really want to i i'm so excited
about tomorrow's live call-in show i have so much funny shit fun stuff i just give you an example
he's telling people that greg's house in santa cruz was 11 million dollars when it was 1.7
million dollars and
someone and then and it's a whole list of other things this guy's saying about greg and i go the
equivalent of that lie mischaracterization of santa house is 11 million versus 1.7 million
is the characterization of everything he says nuts i mean it's sad i really don't want to talk about them. Anyway. Hi, Graciano. What's up, dude?
Not much.
How's your morning going?
Awesome.
I was showering just now thinking about what an adult Matt Souza is and what an adult I am not.
CrossFit used to do this thing called CrossFit Health.
And they would bring in experts from all over the world and talk about the ills of modern medicine and they would be like doctors and scientists and just like show shit like hey you have to have a thousand people take statins for there to be like a point zero zero zero one
percent piece of evidence that statins actually work and then they would break it down and just
talk about how pharma manipulates you and how it's and uh susan would sneak into those zones at
crossfit livermore and i because he's an adult he liked that shit i worked at hq i was best
friends with greg and i hated it i was like the little kid it's like his parents were making him
go to the ballet i was like are you fucking kidding me it's saturday it's a fucking saturday
and sunday over the summer you want me to listen to these doctors talk like i already know i already
know like i don't need to know that i already know don't eat eat lollipops i enjoyed those i'm when my kids turned
it took me three times before somebody questioned it and they were like who are you
who are you why are you here graciano are you inside or are you here? Graciano, are you inside or are you outside?
I see a window and I see a backdrop, but I can't tell if you're outside or if you're inside.
That's how crazy your backdrop is.
I'm inside right now.
Inside, yeah. I appreciate you choosing a place with great audio.
Impeccable.
This is, so this backdrop, this is uh wife's doing ah it took a little work
uh it needs for for our next podcast we do you have to cover that whole back wall with foam so
your voice is
are you close to me where i'm in Santa Cruz, California. Where are you? I'm in Los Banos, California.
Oh, so you are close.
Okay.
I didn't.
It's an hour and a half.
Okay.
And do you know a guy named Bill Collins?
Yeah.
You do know Bill?
Yeah, I know Bill.
Holy shit.
Everyone knows Bill around here.
Oh, what a small world.
This was actually so Bill first when i first came here
you know i went to the gym and everybody arm wrestled yeah yeah everyone starts asking me
about arm wrestling like hey man you arm wrestle and at the time like what do you guys what are
you guys talking about what are you 12 what are you What are you, 12? What are you, 13?
So I was like, no, dude, that's not what I do.
And so people kept bugging me about it.
Like, oh, man, you know what?
You should check out the arm wrestling guys and this and that.
I'm like, what's your guys' obsession with arm wrestling?
So then eventually I met Bill, and then it all made sense.
So Bill got all of these guys into arm wrestling.
So that was like the dominant like niche thing to do.
Like if you lifted weights, you had to go arm wrestle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
We have tournaments here at the fairgrounds and then all of their stuff is blasted everywhere.
Yeah.
So I met Bill as an an old as he was a little
bit older once i met him yeah but i already met him in his 50s like man this guy's a monster
yeah this guy's a total animal how old is bill bill 60 he's in that ballpark man he looks great
i just we were at a he's got some as Asian genes though, too, that are keeping him young.
Right.
Like he's like, got like, he's like Filipino or something Latin in them.
That's like keeping them young.
Look at his skin.
Doesn't wrinkle.
No, he was at, he was at, and you know, when you're that jacked, you got to shave your
arms.
We were at a wedding and you don't really know how old he is.
Yeah.
And so I remember sitting there, you know,
he's still doing the bodybuilder thing. Like he's got his arm shaved and stuff.
Yeah.
I thought, man, this guy looks good. This guy still looks good.
I said, he hasn't aged. He's a little smaller now,
but he hasn't aged at all.
And then we were trying to figure out his age when we're at the table.
Like, man, how old is this guy getting? He's been around.
He's been around forever. Yeah. uh i think someone thought he had turned 60
but he's got to be he's got to be right around there in a previous lifetime i made a movie
called pulling john it's an arm wrestling movie about the greatest arm wrestler who ever lived
uh do i i hear an echo. Is there a YouTube open?
You guys hear an echo?
I hear an echo.
Anyone in the comments here an echo?
Anyway, there was a movie called Pulling John.
It's about the greatest arm wrestler who ever lived, John Brzezink.
And the very first arm wrestling tournament I ever went to, Bill Collins was running it.
And he was so polite and so kind. But he's a manly man, still a little bit, you know, like, you know, a little standoffish.
And over the last, I don't know, it's probably been, it's approaching 20 years now.
We've stayed a little bit in contact.
And I've always felt like he's a good friend.
And he always took care of me over the, like, the five or six years it took me to make the movie.
You know, would make sure I was in the know.
He's just a great dude.
I really, really, really like him. I always thought maybe some, there would be somewhere
along the line that me, him and I would go into business together. We would think of something
and do it together. Like he's that kind of guy. He's a hustler. Yeah. That's, that's,
that's part of his con. He sucks you in because he's such a nice guy. Yeah. Yeah. There he is.
And then, um, you know, for instance, i was new to the area so he pull comes in
introduces himself and says hi and then he sucks you in where it's like hey man you know you should
stop by for this uh arm wrestling practice yeah did you ever go did you ever go i never went
yeah you should go and have your feelings hurt well that, that's – I said for me, for me, there's nothing in it for me
because you guys are going to bring me there, and I'm going to get beat.
Yeah, no, don't say you guys.
I suck.
They had the – arm wrestlers like seven-year-old daughters
were beating me as a grown man.
It fucking sucked, I'm telling you.
Didn't you arm wrestle Hobart in the, likeoe thing yeah and i wrestled james hobart
once and there's video of it and it's a really close contest and then i asked him like you know
10 years later and he said hey dude i was just fucking that's all an act on my product
i'm like oh that's he's a good dude
i am graciano rubio popped up on my radar because i was following um the dave castro who's the
former director of the um uh crossfit games and the future director of the largest uh
fitness competition in the world and um gracia dave had posted something of Graciano's and it was Graciano.
I think the first time I saw him, he did Isabel at 3.30.
And then I called Dave.
I'm like, is this real?
And like we had a little talk about it.
We were tripping on it, like how weird it was.
And then over the years, Dave has reposted a lot of stuff Graciano's done.
And Graciano has – you own a gym, Valley CrossFit or Deer Valley?
Yeah, CrossFit Valley View.
Valley View, Valley View CrossFit, CrossFit Valley View.
So Graciano walked into Valley View CrossFit, started hitting on the coach, married her, and then now he's part owner of that gym and got a kid out of her.
And man, your wife is something else.
Accurate?
Is that all accurate?
Your wife something?
Well, let's just start with the last thing I said is your wife.
You're 100% accuracy so far.
Okay, good.
How about that podcast you did with that dude?
Which one? The one where you can't tell who's the host he's like hello uh i'm here with graciano rubiano uh graciano tell us about
yourself and you're just like uh i was like holy shit i wonder if i could do that to a guest
just invite someone on and be like tell me about yourself
go ahead wasn't that was that weird uh there's a little bit Just invite someone on and be like, tell me about yourself. Go ahead.
Was that weird?
It was a little bit.
It's weirder than this. This is pretty weird and it's weirder than this.
I think for, especially for podcasting,
it's a difference between, you know,
people that kind of make it personal and people that are doing it like for a
business type of affiliation.
So you feel like when you're doing as part of like a brand or a business, like you kind of have to, you know, just the way that you speak is a little bit a little different in terms of kind of the showmanship of it.
Like the the. You can't just kick back and just ask random questions. It's more
of like a, you know, keep it, keep it on topic, keep it professional, you know, make it sound nice
when most people just want to hear like, what is this person like outside of, you know, what's on
display? So every top podcast I know of, that's how they flow. There's no rules to this thing.
That's the beauty of it.
This is less curated.
I hadn't listened to really any podcasts until about the last six months ago.
In my life, I probably listened to the great Joe Rogan for a total of, I don't know, an hour.
And then really no one else. life i probably listened to the great joe rogan for a total of i don't know an hour um and then
really no one else and and the only reason i was listening to joe rogan is because you know
oh this fucking echo where's that coming from
i'm gonna mash somebody not you grassy you're too big to mash no one on this call actually um so
yeah it's um it's a trip.
Now I listen to a shitload of podcasts.
I listen to Justin. We had Justin Coller on yesterday.
I listened to three, and I'm just tripping on them.
It's so cool
that I never listened to one before I came
on this.
You listen to them?
You know what? I really started
during
quarantine, I listened to a lot more.
Yeah.
I mean, I listened to them before that, but they were kind of sporadically.
Yes.
So, yeah, two years ago, I started listening to quite a few more.
Yes, the Isabel video is bonkers.
Teddy, a shit ton of the videos are bonkers.
Yeah.
So many of the videos are bonkers. Yeah. So many of the videos are bonkers.
By the way, guys, those of you who listen to the show, I hear from every guest, I swear, like – what's it called?
Like drum work?
Like what's the word?
There's some phrase for it.
Drum work?
Every guest is like, holy cow, your audience is amazing.
After the podcast, they jumped into my DMs.
They told me how much they like me.
And I assume that you guys equally jump into the DMs of douchebags.
So you guys are quite the – you're such a small crew that we are.
You guys are quite aggressive in a good way, in a good way.
The same way the gophers are aggressive in my backyard.
When did your Instagram account blow up graciano when did you start like let me see how many followers he
has do you have like 20 000 followers yeah 20 000 20.1 yeah it's weird that a dude just out of
los banos just working out in his in his uh local gym for those you don't know, Los Banos is a small town, man, in the middle of nowhere.
What happened that caused your Instagram
to blow up?
There was two
things. First, Castro
dropped into the gym because he was out duck
hunting.
The first time I did
Isabella at 3.30,
and then I started
making, started doing reels
on Instagram.
So I started putting stuff in shorter
form.
And then it starts getting
circulated more by Instagram.
And then it takes
off because that's the main way people
discover new things.
They look through the reels or they pop up like that.
So before, it was just people that I had known,
like local competitions or that you run into.
And maybe they're friends.
They're like, hey, check this guy out.
But then it was first sharing that video,
and then it's all the reels.
So they're all 15 seconds. It's easy to look at and check out, whereas before, I'd always post up longer videos or stuff that just gets buried somewhere that no one ever sees. this podcast that I was making fun of that Graciano does it actually after about 10 minutes
it really starts picking up by the way and if you want to hear a bunch of I'm sure we're going to
get into a bunch of it today but if you want to hear some really cool thinking around working out
like I rode the assault bike yesterday and did a workout and listened to it and I and it was
it was really really cool especially if I was younger and I was still doing some of that shit.
It was fascinating.
One of the things he talks about is that he does Isabel at 3.30 and 20 minutes, under 20 minutes.
And he explains to the guy that during that time, each lift takes four seconds, so he's only working out for two minutes and the totality of the workout and the
importance of what you do that other 18 minutes and i thought that was just fascinating i and you
never failed a single lift you told that guy out of 30 30 um consecutive attempts at 330
correct 30 straight makes yeah and kudos to that guy i was making fun of him but what a great
observation are you surprised that you didn't fail one?
No, because you kind of have to make all of them to make that time.
As soon as you fail one, you've got to pick up the pace too much.
So if you're going every 40 seconds, you fail one.
Now you've got to start going like every 37 seconds or so.
Like that pace ramps up real quick so if you fail one and you're basically over you can maybe you can maybe
miss one and recover um but you certainly can't miss more than one yeah the workout the pace that
you got to go to finish it out is just way too fast it What is your greatest feat of strength in your mind? The one you're
most proud of? That one was the hardest. I'd definitely say that one was the hardest.
Everything else is a shorter term. So, you know, you might suffer for 20 seconds or 30 seconds or something but you're in pain like from minute three on wow oh and you did the is that the last
one yeah that was the last one yeah i really like that one-legged uh
was that impromptu or was that planned uh that was impromptu that's actually it was
so people now know it there's a chinese lifter that does it but i picked it up from if anyone's
followed strongman for a long time i picked it up from jesse mirande because i grew up in Oregon and Jesse Marundy was from Washington.
So Jesse Marundy back then would do that on some of the overhead lifts.
And so that was the first time I had ever seen it because the guy was a good weightlifter.
So when he did strongman, he was doing things like push jerks, which in strongman was kind of weird at the time you know to do like an axle or something or a lot of them are doing like a push press or some kind of odd you know stiff variation of it so
he would use his explosiveness to win those overhead events and he's kind of a taller you
know not a little more lanky than your your competitor. So he would do the one-leg stand at the end.
And that was the first time I had ever seen it.
I thought, oh, that is the perfect display of, like,
you just got your ass whooped.
The perfect taunting of, like, I'm just at a different level on this event.
So that was the first time I had ever seen it.
And I think he had picked it up from some, some other weightlifter from,
you know,
decades ago or something.
So that was my introduction to it.
And so I picked it up when,
when you're,
when you do like an overhead event and strongman,
that's like the,
that's just like the cherry on top.
Like,
yeah,
you're not going to,
you're not going to match this one.
A display of domination.
I think the first time I,
I think the first time I saw it was with John North over at Cal strength back
in the day when like him and Donnie Shankle and when Glenn Penlay was still,
still at Cal strength as well, too.
So I don't know who the weightlifter is. I'm not a, I'm not a historian,
but I'm sure, I'm sure someone knows like where that originated, but that goes back a long time. I haven't been, I haven't been able to find out
where that, where that really started at. Hey, how do you end up in Los Banos? You're born in,
you're born in Salem. You went to school in Oregon, correct? College? Correct. And how,
how do you end up in Los Banos? So I had taken a break from school.
And my dad, my whole family works in construction.
So this job pops up in California.
And because it's an Oregon-based company, no one really wants to go.
So he said, my dad called me up and was like, hey, if you want to come, you know, I can get you in on this job because a job this far away, no one's going to want to go to.
That's going to be easy to bring you along. So at the time. I was working, I was working at the post office delivering mail, and they had this career freeze.
So I was making decent money, but there was no benefits attached to it.
It's like you're not getting all the good stuff for why you work as a mailman.
So I said, well, then it's just a simple-
Which is like what?
Like health insurance and tenure and like
retirement and all that yeah your pension your insurance you're not getting all that they're
just writing you a bigger check and saying hey you know we can't hire as a as a career position
but we need people to go out and deliver the mail so I said um you know it's just a decision
of where am I going to make more money so So I was there in Newport, Oregon.
And in my head, I thought, this place is not where I want to spend the next few decades.
But in California, California is about 10 times the size of Oregon.
Longer term, there's going to be more opportunity there.
So I'll make more money. I'm closer to where I eventually want to be.
So I ended up coming down here and it was to build a water treatment plant.
So there's a water treatment plant,
maybe 20 minutes away from where I'm at now.
And I can see it from the freeway, right?
I'm pretty sure I've seen it when I drive by.
Can you?
Maybe.
Okay.
Maybe.
It'll be in the distance.
Okay.
So I came down, and then this place, at the time, I was going to a commercial gym,
and eventually I said, man, I can't take this place anymore.
What was it? Was it a gold or something?
What is Los Banos have or just a mom and pop global gym?
No, there's a, there's a chain that's in shape. It's a chain local to California.
So I don't know it.
They had one of those. And eventually I thought,
I'm simply wasting too much time to get my workout done here.
And then ended up coming to a CrossFit gym.
And then that's how my whole CrossFit experience started.
I needed a place that I could get ready for a strongman competition where I wasn't spending half my workout waiting on people,
standing around people in the way.
And then I started slowly doing some CrossFit.
Obviously, I met my wife and ended up staying here.
So, let me see if I can see what I just gleaned from that. You were a postman in Newport,
Oregon. You wanted to get out of there. Your dad was in the construction business. He offered you
a gig down in California. You're like, okay, you picked up, you came down here. How long was that?
And then at this point, you're already a professional strongman.
No, that came afterwards.
Okay. And then, and how long did that gig take to build that water treatment plant?
About two years.
Oh, that's a good gig. And then what, and what do you do now? What's your, what's your,
what's your vocation now? So I run the gym and then I also manage money for people.
Are you an accountant? No, I'm an investment advisor. Gotcha. So I own an RIA and then I
help people manage their money for retirement, you know, other investment purposes. You what an RIA?
managing money for retirement, other investment purposes.
You what an RA?
RIA.
It's just an investment advisory firm.
Okay.
That's the technical name of it.
Yeah.
You have a very unique cadence to the way you speak that makes me seem like you might have some sort of specialty like that.
Like you're very accurate with your words.
Yeah, you have to be pretty clear yeah you can't have like too many o's or not enough o's zeros right you can't even
call them o's they have to be zeros also if he talks too fast i'm gonna think he's like uh he's
like a slick salesman type you know and that's not the that's not the reputation you want with a uh
investment advisor there yeah you're gonna think you're getting conned they're just a bunch of words so it sounds
right and then i'll sign right here do you do bitcoin graciano me personally yeah you personally
me personally i do but not not for investment purposes for education just to learn you
dabble in it to learn or educational um more for
more for cryptocurrency as a tool in general in terms of how it can be used
so like purchasing heroin from china and bringing it here that's freedom
um what are you tripping at all on it right now are you excited as it fucking just
just points at the bottom and just goes straight into the fucking ground are you excited does that
do you see that as opportunity yeah i i so Yeah. So cryptocurrency as an investment, I don't care about whatsoever. It's more of the way that it can be used as a social tool that I care about. So I think that all the hype gets, everything that gets talked about, like 99% of what gets talked about is using it as a way to make more money.
Right. You're talking about a way for more freedom so they care about they care about them getting rich but they don't see how it can be used its function as an actual currency
for the betterment of humanity you're saying correct so there's some top guys like jack
dorsey's one of them there's a few
other people they start talking about it and it goes over most people's head yeah like yeah yeah
whatever we don't really know what you're talking about um but that to me is where it's more valuable
isn't it weird that jack dorsey would be interested in that aspect of cryptocurrency, of its true value, the way you're talking about it, when he's such a closed-minded racist bigot?
Well, I can't speak on that part.
I mean, it seems inconsistent.
It seems so.
I think part of it is that i actually do believe see i do because i
listen to joe rogan podcast okay i do believe his take which is dorsey the individuals different
than dorsey the uh you know the public figure so he's running twitter he's got to do some
things that are a little different than than how he is personally.
I only hate Jews when I'm at the concentration camp at my house. They're fucking welcome. Bring them in. Bring them in. Bring them in. Bring them in. the kkk rally i just i just put it it's just you know so one of we're pretty good we give food to
the children and just pinch the occasional black man but but my neighbors are black and and i like
them and and i let them borrow my lawnmower i don't know hey that that goes with what i would
say it's too much of a it's too much of a um i mean and i'm open to be like hey savon you don't
see the big picture really what he's doing is blah blah i'm'm open to be like, hey, Savon, you don't see the big picture. Really, what he's doing is blah, blah. I'm totally open to like, hey, because we're surrounded by people who look at the world through a paper towel roll, right?
Like this.
And they can't see the big picture.
But man, Jack Dorsey's done some bad shit.
Hey, don't listen to what they say.
Watch what they do.
Okay.
That's the biggest thing.
People like symbolism in theater, but their actions always say a little
bit differently it's pretty fascinating did you the joe rogan thing is fascinating isn't it
it the whole thing is odd to me just just the whole thing because the people that criticize
it don't ever listen well that's a that's a good point i'm also talking about how his friends
are reacting to all the reactions are so superficial to me a bunch of people are
sending me there's a guy he's a neuroscientist sam harris or something and i and people keep
sending me his reaction and i listened to his reaction yesterday and there's like there's no
depth to anyone's reaction jocko willett's reaction is absurd i mean i don't listen to his podcast and i don't know anything about him but man he's like his
reaction is shows no intellectual fortitude no strength no i'm just like and by and i'll be more
specific they're having their reaction to joe like they're not looking at it like in a deeper in a deeper essence like what did joe
really do like no one wants to be like what what is the let's talk about the planet of the apes
joke let's talk about the words he used like no one's everyone's like well my react joe is actually
a great guy i know he drinks too much and i know he does too much ayahuasca but really we should
give him it's like dude what like? Like who cares about any of that?
Like I feel like you have to be – I feel like when people react to it, they're just addressing the lowest common denominator, the dumbest people in the room.
Do you – am I – are you following me?
Yeah, I think part of that, especially the kind of the surface stuff.
Yeah.
I think that people are defending themselves ah well if you can
if you can cancel joe rogan yes with that level of audience you can cancel anybody yes so when
they put this out there they're not thinking like in terms of joe rogan they're thinking
stuff that they've done yeah well i'm worse than joe rogan so i'm gonna jump in and defend
joe on this other stuff because they're looking at it like this is this is starting to be where
you gotta draw your line in the sand if someone just needs to say someone powerful he didn't do
anything wrong shut up and then explain why he didn't do anything wrong explain how words work
explain how protecting that word is actually at the essence of systemic racism.
Explain the logic.
Turn it into a mathematical equation.
Just explain it to people like, hey, you're on the wrong side of history by persecuting Joe.
All you're doing is empowering these.
I mean it's just – no one wants to have that discussion.
I like Graciano's take on it.
I think he's on to something.
Yes, yes.
They all are just saying
hey we're kind of putting this up and defending ourselves a little bit but they don't want to go
in depth because the more in depth they go the more it's going to open them up to the attack
yeah so i actually every time someone says n word i want to fucking punch them in the face like
like you're part of the problem you're just you're scared to say the word too you're
don't talk about that subject at all if you're not comfortable with're scared to say the word too. You're don't talk about that subject
at all. If you're not comfortable with it, I'm totally cool with that. Some guy wanted to call
and justify pedophilia on my show the other day. I'm like, Hey dude, I don't have that discussion.
That's one of the ones I don't have. You weren't here for that. The live call-in show.
No, I told me, tell me you please hung up on him.
Yeah. I told him, I said, I absolutely will not talk about that. Kids need to be protected at all fucking costs.
He was trying to justify like why it's okay for a 19-year-old to sleep with a 16-year-old or something like that.
And I'm like, hey, dude, I don't – like I have kids.
I'm not interested in anything.
I'm like – I'm interested in protecting kids at all costs, at all costs, even if it means sacrificing the elderly.
Kids are everything.
They're all we have.
And especially young women should be protected at all costs.
Yeah.
Especially.
And if you don't know that, anytime you're – sorry, Garciano.
Anytime you have a question about whether something should be done to women or not, just remember have a mom a sister and a daughter and just start plugging them into those roles just start plugging
them into those roles always plug your plug your mom into that role would you want any of that
shit being done to your mom talked about but your mom that's why mom jokes are so good
yeah that's you you're saying good shit yeah that is the truth about crypto
and that is the truth about how why we're seeing so many shallow reactions i really like that
well yeah i think
this well it really started you know now that we're on a similar well similarly
covid you got to pick your team this is the same thing like you're
gonna have to pick your team you're either pro Joe or anti-Joe like this one isn't gonna this
one's not leaving any room to be in the middle we need to have free discussion and thought and
and no one ever thinks so let's say we get rid of Joe and he's gone. Right. You know, all these people who listen to his podcast, where do you think they're going to go?
God, I hope they come to my podcast, please.
I beg of you.
You know, they're not just going to stop listening to that content.
Right.
So if you're really thinking like, oh, we're going to get this, you know, misinformation or all this stuff off, that's not going to happen. They're going to get
that information from somewhere else. And likely, it's going to be a worse source of information
than Joe Rogan. So if you're really trying to jump in and protect people because they can't
make decisions for themselves, you're going to send them down the rabbit hole of the Internet.
Yeah. Now they got to you know, they're going to see someone else.
And that person may not that person may not be as fair as Joe Rogan.
You know, that person may be a bit more biased. That person might actually present the information in a worse way.
And so you don't really have it's not like an either or thing it's just a trade-off uh uh excuse me that is not true this is not true jim clays who's the seven did not hang up on him
he talked for about another 10 minutes about other stuff he presented four times i should have hung
up on him right away anytime someone like people call on her bossy with me i should just hang up on him he talked for about another 10 minutes about other stuff he presented four talks i should have hung up on him right away anytime someone like people calling her bossy
with me i should just hang up on them i'm the boss but um he presented me four topics of discussion
i picked one and then when we were done with that one he tried to circle back to fucking
banging people who are underage and that's when i hung up on him jim cleases did tattle on me to Daddy Rosa. Hey, he had Sanjay.
He had Sanjay on.
And kudos to Sanjay for coming on.
And he gave Sanjay enough rope to hang himself.
And Sanjay did hang himself.
I don't understand the – I mean, who else could he have on?
That's the head of the propaganda machine.
I mean, I thought – I was a little disappointed for joe to say that
he doesn't he he needs to be more balanced than his guests because he was a fucking bernie supporter
and and and bernie is all about um uh he's all about the welfare state he's all about
taking money from people he believes the government can spend money better than me and you and it's it's it's it's
nuts and joe joe and russell brand and these people um are bill mauer they're slowly realizing
that like you think it's okay to make all these laws against smoking right because smoking is bad
but it sets precedence for all of a sudden if you don't like white people, now you can set all these laws against white people.
Like you have to remember every time we set a law, it sets precedent for something.
And so – and I remember thinking that because I was a hardcore liberal in Berkeley and all these smoking laws were passing.
I'm like, man, this is like some Nazi shit.
Like I'm not for smoking.
I don't think people should smoke.
Like you have to stand out in the street to smoke? nazi shit like i'm not for smoking i don't think people should smoke like this like you can't you
have to stand out in the street to smoke well now they're trying to now they're trying to ban jewel
yeah this is crazy this is not how this is not how you win a game someone put up a someone put
up a joke where they said well we have this healthier plant-based alternative
so they're like you know we have this healthier plant-based alternative. So they're like, you know, we can stop smoking Juul and go back to this plant-based alternative.
That's funny.
And it's not like people are going to stop using nicotine.
Right.
They're going to keep using it.
It's a powerful drug.
It's a great drug.
It's very unique in its properties and its effects, too.
Did you ever chew?
No.
No?
Did you ever smoke? Nope i'll do a cigar occasionally i don't shoot because the first time i did it i threw up everywhere yeah me too i was
like i'm not doing this again it's just yeah no no that's when that's when you go harder
lean into that i barfed the first time i smoked a cigarette but that that didn't quit i'm no quitter
so there was there's actually there's a back you know a very uh unpopular politician that came out
against you know the smoking bans you know that the government shouldn't be telling you what you
can and can't do with your body yeah and that this creates a slippery slope
because if we say hey you're not able to smoke you know at what point does the government step
in and say hey you can't eat a cheeseburger right because that's harmful to you yes hey that's
coming they're trying that is it as absurd as that sounds they're trying that at what point
do they you know knock on your door and make sure you got your daily exercise so this was this was written like 20 plus years ago and it said you know if you're here
cheering on these smoking bans you're gonna have to be okay when when they step up and tell you
what you can eat and how you have to move so said, you better not be eating a cheeseburger behind your computer right now,
reading this in favor of a smoking ban.
Right.
Because it's the same idea.
It's based on the same principles.
Right.
And then now, here we are 20 years later,
and so those things are coming true.
What is the word for that?
Is that philosophy or ethics?
What is the word for that when people are that is that philosophy or ethics what is the word for that when
people are looking through the world through a paper towel roll and they can't see the big picture
like they can't see that if you stop tell people to stop doing this you have to recognize that the
bigger picture the precedent is eventually you can stop them from doing everything that's why you
have to allow hate speech to people because what you see is not hate speech today will be seen as hate speech tomorrow
that's why like you can't be like if someone's on the street corner screaming god is a piece
of shit we have to let them scream that like you like what like you're looking for a perspective
well yeah what is there there must be some there must be like some like um word for like
yeah no myopic but there's there's there's
like it's like um philosophy will have like it's called the uh intelligent intelligent perspective
uh fallacy or there's got to be some um there's we need an ethic we need we need a smarter host
for this show whose legs do you have?
Do you have your mom's legs or your dad's legs?
Probably my mom's.
Yeah.
What does she say about, is your mom still around?
Yeah.
What does she say about your legs these days?
Does she ever comment about your legs?
No, she's, the only comment is that I look like my grandfather.
Oh, that's nice.
That's kind of cool.
But that's about it.
What's your makeup?
Are both your parents the same ethnicity?
No, my mom's white.
My dad's Mexican.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
How did you get the name Graciano?
That's his name.
Your grandpa's name?
My dad's name.
Your dad's name.
Oh, so you're Graciano II.
Yeah.
And what's your son's name?
Do you have a son?
Yeah.
I have a five-year-old.
His name is Magnus.
Magnus.
I like that name.
You were talking to the gentleman on the podcast about how your brother was 11 years older than
you and he benched 315 and you had made that your goal to bench more than 315 because your older
brother did it. And then you drew that to why it's important for you to be a good role model
for your son because you want your son to aspire to beat what um wow um this is really
weird do you mind if i answer this really quick this is a trip i apologize this is your podcast
uh graciana but this is a weird phone call uh tony how are you i'm good how are you I'm good uh oh are we in trouble no I
told Colton after
that last podcast a couple days ago
somebody called in
supposedly me I said I'm gonna call him
and at least tell him my name's
not Dick yes yes
Graciano I apologize one of
the major topics
of the Sevan podcast is a gentleman named
Colton Mertens out of Iowa.
And we had an impersonator call as Colton's dad the other day and said his name was Dick Mertens.
I apologize for that.
I will block that man forever.
This is actually Colton Mertens' dad, Anthony Mertens.
Yeah, this is him.
I bet Colton's anxiety level just went through the roof.
He's probably listening.
Joe Rogan ain't got shit on me.
Anthony Mertens.
Mr. Mertens.
Good morning.
How is Colton?
How is Colton?
How come Colton, Graciana, do you mind if I ask Mr. Mertens a few questions?
Okay.
Why is your son so quiet, Anthony?
Why is he such a smart, you know, what do they call him, introvert?
What happened?
I don't know.
He was always quiet.
You know, it's kind of funny.
You know, when we were killing around the farm, he's always kind of quiet.
So I always think he's mad about something or something's on his mind so i'll ask him what's the matter
he's like nothing so you act like you're mad right man okay so a little bit later i say
cordy mad he goes god damn it when we get fucking mad you don't quit asking me
so he he's the type of kid that he he doesn't he doesn't get mad very easily but when he's the type of kid that he, he doesn't,
he doesn't get mad very easily,
but when he's pissed,
he's pissed all day.
So that's what the kind of joke with his little brother and me,
you know,
if we,
uh,
work together and Cody makes you mad,
I always say,
Cody,
God damn it.
Now I got to work with him all day.
And he's pissed.
So did you go through a phase like that as a kid?
I think that's just something that some boys go through,
right?
Like he's just like,
they, they, they go, they go, it it's the journey inward was he ever outward yeah yeah i mean yeah i i don't know i was kind of a oh i i think i was a little angry back at times
back in the day and i still get angry so i mean i don't know uh not at him though he's too big and
strong now no actually you know with you know, with Colton.
You redirected towards your younger son.
You beat him now.
No, it's he, Colton, you know, if something's going wrong on the farm,
or I think he screwed something up, and I say something to him,
he don't say much.
He just, he gets that look like, like, you know, you're,
you're just crazy old man.
Shut up.
And then, you know, and my youngest brother or his younger brother, Cody, he drops it.
He's, if I say something to him, he's like, he'll tell me, yeah.
He's like, shut up, dad.
You're just, you're nuts.
I'm like, Colton, don't say nothing.
But you know he's thinking it.
So we don't argue.
We don't, you know, and Colton leaves the house.
He kind of got his schedule.
He gives me my orders, and then I don't see him for the better part of the day.
My mom just is in the comments, too.
My mom just said, hi, Mr. Mertens.
You have a great son.
I understand he reads a lot.
Did he get that from you?
You don't have to answer that.
Mom, start your own podcast, please.
No, no, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Does he get that from you, Anthony?
You know, I don't know.
I think he kind of started that in college.
He doesn't even at home.
He hardly ever watches TV.
He'll be doing something on his phone or he's listening to something.
He's kind of all about the self-betterment type thing.
Yeah, me too.
He's trying to always improve.
He doesn't waste all the time watching TV. So he just reads. Yeah, me too.
How much weed does he smoke?
How much weed does he smoke?
He doesn't smoke any.
I know.
I'm pretty sure he don't, but yeah.
Logan Mars in the comments says,
this isn't Dick Mertens.
He's a fraud.
No, this is actually the real Mr. Mertens, Logan yeah how dare you yeah i appreciate you calling um you're not allowed to call in on a non-calling show but
you pulled the mertens card maybe we could circle back and talk sometime yep we'll do that okay
thank you for calling in brother tell colton we love him all right thanks okay bye holy shit this
show has no fucking boundaries.
Was that, was that, I'm feeling really insecure that I interrupted the show with you. Are you?
Is the audio better with this? Oh, that you didn't waste any time. You're trying to work
with your audio. I can't tell, but I appreciate you taking that time to. Perfect. Wow.
I'm going to change the name of this podcast to The Mertens.
Incredible.
Wow.
Man, if my mom called in another podcast and talked about me, I would be so embarrassed.
Not that you should be embarrassed, Colton.
You're the man.
I'm embarrassed?
That's awesome.
Yeah. you're the man i'm embarrassed that's awesome yeah um so um you have a um were your legs
always shaped like that or is that just from muscle i mean they're so fucking muscular
yeah mostly i mean part of that's genetic yeah part of it is i was 300 pounds at one point. Your body weight.
And how much do you weigh now?
Uh, two 45.
Oh,
wow.
So some,
when you,
when you spend your teenage years lifting as much as you can.
Yeah.
And then eating everything in sight,
you build a lot of muscle mass.
Yeah.
And that's,
uh,
that's basically it.
I mean,
yeah, those quads are nuts
and those calves it is nuts
so there's definitely there's definitely a mostly genetic component
um but there's a training and lifestyle component to it as well
there's a there's a great video in there sues of
him dead lifting and just all his junk just sitting on top of the bar too if you can find it
i thought i pasted the link in here but i didn't um and um why did you drop down from 300 to 245
was that i'm assuming you made that an effort you were like okay i'm tired of weighing 300 pounds how tall are you five nine
okay well hold on hold on let me check my medical chart five nine three hundred pounds nope nope
that's bad there was there was um there's just kind of a moment where i realized that it's not
beneficial to strength anymore.
And so walking around that heavy is not producing any strength benefit,
but it has a recovery cost to it.
So just walking around and doing normal stuff,
you burn more energy so you can't train as hard.
So I just woke up one day and was kind of like, I could probably be this strong a lot lighter. And if you got rid of this weight for most of the time, then I could train harder.
You know, I'd recover more. I could get more training in. So I just woke up one day. It was
like a Wednesday. And I said, well, you know what? I'm going to start my diet today.
And then maybe three, four months later, I was down like 30 pounds.
And then it just slowly and steadily went down from there.
But there was no major moment or major anything.
I just woke up one day.
I was like, you know know today's the day i'm
gonna start what year that's probably 2009 yeah 2009 or maybe early 2010
you you you started lifting um um well before i to that, to when you were 14 years old, why – what was the – in your eating, what were some of the primary things you immediately attacked to start losing weight?
What did you do?
Methods?
The only thing I did was track calories and macronutrients.
That was it.
I didn't do anything else.
Everything was weighed and then i would do one i'd maybe do one cheat evening a week so which was usually
usually beer so saturday night would be like all right friday or saturday night i'm gonna go out
all the extra calories are all gonna be alcohol and then just wake up and do it the next day but there's nothing nothing special
nothing fancy about it um keep the calorie to a certain point eat enough protein that was it
so what did your without going into the macros unless you want to what was your calories um
was it just unregulated like get 300 pounds is like hey just eat as much unless you want to what was your calories um was it just unregulated
like at 300 pounds is it like hey just eat as much as you want to of whatever you want
totally unregulated okay so you know at your peak do you know how many calories a day you were you
were eating um or what would you guess i'd probably guess 5,000. Yeah. Probably something like that.
So your toilet paper consumption went down too.
A little bit.
A little bit, yeah.
My favorite part about that is you were like, it was a Wednesday and I just woke up and decided to start.
Because, you know, and I'm sure you know this, Graciano, you hear these people like, hey, I want to start working on my diet.
Like, what do you recommend I buy? Or like, what should I do? And you're like, start, choose to make the
decision on your next meal, and then continue to make that decision on every meal after that.
And then the other thing you said, which is just really important, I want to highlight is,
you're like, yeah, I have my cheat meal. I decided to do it in calories with beer. I enjoy beer on
the weekend. And then guess what? I woke up the next day and I re-jumped right back on my diet. And those are, I think, two of the most important
takeaways for anybody. You don't need it to be a Monday. You don't need to be a January 1st to
start. You don't need to buy anything to start. And then when you do have a little bit of a fall
off, so to speak, or a cheat day, you don't need to go down the hole of, oh, well, the whole thing's
screwed. So now I'm just going to continue down this like downward spiral.
You're just like, no, I just woke up the next day and restarted.
So I just wanted to highlight those two points.
Cause I think that's really important for everybody listening.
And the only, and this was before,
this is before you had things like my fitness pal.
So I just wrote it down on paper.
You buy a digital scale that you get on Amazon now for like 15 bucks,
weigh it, write it down, and that's it. And even if the only thing you do is just write it down,
even if you're not even concerned about, even if you don't actually follow a plan or anything,
just the accountability portion of cutting out all the nonsense right there for most people. Like if
they, if all they do is track, a lot of times we have people track and then they come back and they
lose weight. And like, what should I change? I'm like, well, nothing, because you're just being
honest with yourself. Like now that you're writing down, this is what I did. You're like,
oh, I shouldn't do that. I shouldn't do do this so people will people start tracking and all of a sudden they're losing like two pounds a week and they get to a point that
they've they've actually made significant progress and then they're like oh so what should i change
and it's like well you should just do what you're doing now i don't even have anything to tell you
because you're already making such fast progress doing what you already know just
actually looking at it and having a spot to be like this is what i did keeps you honest and
keeps you on track yeah so some of our meetings are like okay you need to do this you need to do
that there's a lot of there's a lot of adjustments that need to be made. But a ton of people, it's literally if all you do is write it down,
that takes care of all your problems.
Awareness to it.
We had someone that they lost six.
We did a challenge.
In six weeks, they lost like 23 pounds.
And all it was was they cut out all the extra like stuff that's not really a meal
so they didn't put honey in their green tea which they were drinking like half a gallon of green tea
they didn't add this they didn't add this so just an extra stuff that they're not even
you don't even think of as as adding calories or adding food or as part of your nutrition
they got done with
the six weeks and were like, oh, I didn't really change anything.
And I'm like, what do you mean you didn't change anything?
You lost 20 plus pounds.
Like obviously you made giant changes.
Right.
You're just not aware of it.
So you can go either direction.
Like you can go up without being aware of it because there's little tiny things that
add up. You can go down without even recognizing it just because of these little tiny
changes. So like, if that's, if that's all you did was just be accountable and had an assessment of
this is what I'm doing every day. That's it. Like that's, there's no more. You don't have to get into the mindfulness and the habits and all these other things.
If you write it down, you're accountable to yourself.
It's a done deal.
Same with personal finance too, right?
Yeah.
If you're honest about do I really need to spend money on these things?
Yep. Yep.
So for instance, I have a, I put a hundred percent,
almost a hundred percent of everything I buy is on a credit card and I pay it
off at the end of the month. So there's never a balance on it.
But then at the end of the month, I have a sheet. This is everything I bought.
So you look back and be like, Ooh, we're going to forget it.
We're going to cross that one out. Right. But when you look back and be like, ooh, we're going to forget. We're going to cross that one out.
Right.
But when you review it, you look at it and be like, okay, this is what happened.
You need to have an accurate assessment of what happened in order to make any changes going forward.
So it's really the same.
It's the same idea either way you're doing it,
but when it comes to money or finance, it's real simple.
There's less emotion involved in there and it's clear cut. Like, Hey,
I need to not purchase this or I need to do this.
Then with the food aspect, it gets, it gets a little trickier.
Fundamentally, you're doing the same thing. It's just that you start
adding emotion and other, you know, other elements that shouldn't be there, but are,
and we start making it way more complicated than it needs to be.
Someone asked in the comments, what you, if you could recommend one financial book what would it be
what is his best uh ken brown former running uh wide receiver for the uh oakland raiders
what's what what is his best financial book i think he maybe even won the heisman
uh let's see most popular one you know what my favorite My favorite one. I don't know if it has the best advice. My favorite one is The Wealthy Barber.
So for people who own their own business, a lot of people are a big fan of rich dad, poor dad.
But I'm a big fan of the wealthy barber because it highlights a very specific point, which is you have to live within your means.
So there's plenty of barbers out there doing really well because they don't have to buy the fancy car and live in the big house and blow all their money for status.
And so they're able to save and invest far more of their money than what some other people are able to do.
Is this the book?
That's the book. Hey, it's in a Christian bookstore. Is it a Christian book?
I don't think so. Hey, it's in a Christian bookstore. Is it a Christian book?
I don't think so.
Oh.
They don't talk anything.
They don't say anything about religion, but.
It's funny because the only, there's this dude, I forget his name.
He's a black dude, and he's like, he's definitely a Christian dude.
It's the only financial book I ever read.
I can't remember.
I always confuse him with a guy named Ramsey, but I thinksey was his mentor um uh chris hogan yes yes chris hogan and it was a pretty um i like i like the book it didn't have
anything for me in it but i really liked the book like i was already like aware of all that shit
like hey like if you want money you better just stop spending money like that was basically like
what kind of what you're saying stop being a jackass if you go out to dinner
don't buy the 200 bottle of wine you like it was that's six dollars at walmart or wherever
um seven christians read about finance too no no i i understand i understand but i'm just saying
i'm like that book that i read was like it was like a mixture of like like you know um using
god to help yeah it was just obvious
that the guy was a hardcore christian oh my mom's trying i read the wealthy barber excellent it's
not a christian book though all right fine fine we'll see so because i come from you know i come
from a blue collar background yeah so one of the things you know one of the things that people run into now, and it's becoming more and more repeated, is people making the decision between college or trade school.
Right.
And it's because I've heard this so many times, when people say it, they have this weird condescension to it.
They have this weird condescension to it.
Like they say it in this oddly condescending manner of like, well, if, you know, college isn't for you, like you can do trade school.
Or, you know, they kind of say it in a way of like, well, if you can't get in or you can't excel in college, like, you know, that's an okay alternative.
But the reality today is financially, it's a far better option for most people.
Like it just is flat out superior financially.
Define financially for me.
You're saying that financially, when you say the word financially, it's better for them financially.
I think at 65 years old, you'll have less to worry about.
Correct.
You'll have more money.
Oh, I hear air sirensirens are you guys being bombed oh no that's that's our fide fridge but sometimes these pick up background noise
and amplify it okay what's what's your definition of financially it's financially better to do the
trade school then so if you view it purely as the money that you put out and how much money you're going to get back, the trade school superior.
So someone that goes to trade school, if you're graduating 22, 23 without debt, because a lot of times you work during trade school.
So you're going to be 23 making good money with no debt and immediately start putting money away for your future.
with no debt and immediately start putting money away for your future.
So you're saving, unless you blow it and you buy a giant truck and you spend all your money chasing women and other stuff like that, you have the opportunity to put that away.
And so let's say you get to 30, 40, 50 years old, someone that went the college route,
and instead of making money, they were,
they were negative cashflow because they're in college and not working. And Thursday through
Sunday, they're drunk. Then you get out. Come on, come on. Tuesday, Tuesday through Sunday,
go on. Then you get out. You're making, you're, you're making less money out of college than that person at trade school.
You're just hoping that as you advance in your career at some point, you're going to be making, as you get promoted and move up, you're going to be out earning them.
But at first you're making less.
Most people graduating college are making less than the people graduating trade school.
So by the time you're 30, you're just happy that you have your own
apartment and your college debts paid off. But this guy that went to trade school at 30,
they have a down payment on a house. They're married. They're thinking about having their
first kid. They're already advanced and they already have money saved. And so when you're
able at a young age to put that money away and get it invested
and make better decisions early on, those compound over time. So an initial small gain
is hard to overcome when you have years for that to compound. So when you get to 40,
this guy's been putting money away for 15 years.
His 401k balance has been has been growing. He's been putting money, extra money away at 40.
It's even at 40. It's still hard for most college degrees to be ahead of where you would be if you had gone to a trade school.
You know, you might be 40 until the time you're actually making the same money. Then later on in your career, okay, now when you're 50, you're making more,
but you can't close the gap because this guy had so many years of putting more money away
that you can't really close that gap between the two.
Like this guy's money's been growing. He's owned his house for another 10 years.
He's done all these other things early on in his life. It takes you a long time to close that gap.
Yes.
Not to mention if you're so- Especially if you buy a house that you can afford, especially if you buy a house you can afford.
You know, to use the example of the wealthy barber,
this guy also doesn't have to spend his money
impressing people.
So when you work in an office
and you've got all these people showing off
and you feel like you're trying to get to that promotion
and you're hanging out with your boss
who makes three times what you make
and you got to go golfing with them.
You got to do all these things.
Sorry, 20 times.
20 times what I make. Go on.
So as you do all that, you're not actually saving any money. You're not any better off.
And so that's the, that's the difference for, you know, that book, the wealthy barber
is you can go to trade school. You can have, you live within your means. You're able, especially when you're young, to get a huge leg up.
Whereas a lot of the flash, you know, especially when you see stuff on social media, all that glamour, most of that is is fueled through debt.
So you just you take out loans and everything's all debt.
They got a giant car payment, huge house payment on more house than
they really need all these things to impress people and for status but you're not really
getting yourself in a better position so that's where and that's where and that's where 65 years
old really matters by the way you do not want to be fucked up when you're 65 financially by then
you want to be like you want to be chill like get it for 65 financially. By then you want to be like, you want to be chill.
Like get it for,
for those of you who are in your twenties who are listening to this show or
thirties, like shit gets when you used to, how old are you?
Graciano?
30.
Yeah.
You know too much for being 30.
When you hit 45 shit starts to get a little real.
I'm not saying you still can't grind,
but also if you have kids,
there becomes this massive competition for time massive competition you think you think um going
on a diet is hard emotionally try try not spending time with your fucking kids you kind of need your
30s yeah you you're in a you're in an interesting spot because you need your 30s to grind right but you also have the the largest emotional engine charge that you'll ever have in your
life you have a child already that you need to spend a lot of time with right
it requires crazy discipline and balance then you really don't want to be fucking around with
like drinking and shit like that yeah but i think the you have less energy but the kids the kids provide you
motivation and energy that you wouldn't otherwise have so for sure if you're if it's just you and
you only have to take care of yourself yeah you just don't push as hard yeah hey as simple as
that i was coasting at fucking 43 that's a great point i was coasting you know you know like my
life was set and then
i had a kid and like everything well and getting fired didn't actually help helped a little bit too
but uh um yeah you have a kid and you yeah yeah you're reborn you're right you're absolutely when
you're when you're in the thick of it yeah when you're in the thick of it it feels like oh man
this would be so much easier without this without all these other obligations
mainly being kids but my wife and i would be super rich if we didn't have kids instead we're poor
at the same time you're thinking you know as you're doing it
we always look back and be like man how much how are we how do we waste so
much time like man we wasted so much time back then and when things got hard you didn't you
didn't go to that like next level of effort like yeah we worked hard and we got stuff done, but once you have kids, everything
gets tighter, but then you're able to work harder. So it's, you have to take a little time to reflect
of like, well, if I, yeah, but if I didn't have that, would I really be willing to work this hard
or would I just kind of, kind of mail it in like, ah, you know, today was a good day i did what i was supposed to do all right see you
guys tomorrow versus that extra pressure pushes you to be better graciano i want to leave two
houses for each of my kids in california and and i would have never had that aspiration so i have
three boys so i need six houses paid off and i. And you know, it's California. And I would
have never had that aspiration if I didn't have kids, I'd have been like, all right, well, my mom
and dad are going to die. I'll collect some of their loot. I'll get some of their houses. I'll
chill. Me and my wife will hang out and just bone and do CrossFit piece. You know, like it's good
ass life. I ain't hating on it i got a great wife like it's cool
yeah you're right and it's fun it's fun having those goals
it's fun so you're the other thing is uh
your height well it's fun but your highs and lows are also have a bigger range to them
so like what do you mean?
Explain me.
You mean when you have kids?
Yeah.
Explain that to me.
So,
you know,
once you have kids,
like your,
like your level of emotion gets way higher,
like the peak.
So like the good days are way better,
but then your bad days are way worse.
So before,
before you're like, yeah, you know,
today was, you know, today was good. And then your bad days aren't as bad because you're not
pressed for time. Uh, you're, you have more money. You're not worried about other people,
but then once you have kids, like those good days are superior to all the, all the good days before.
Yes. But then the bad days are way
worse yeah it's not even comparable so for instance uh our kid lately like our kid pees the bed
yeah it's good and then when you're at that forces you to change the sheets more than once every two
months through all your stuff. Yep.
Right.
At the end of the day, like you get home and you're like, oh, man, I got to make this bed right now.
And the kid, you know, after.
Do you have a king size mattress?
Do you have a king size mattress?
Yeah.
I'm so happy to hear you say that you don't like that either because I always feel like such a pussy.
The mattress is so heavy for me. And I'm so glad that you don't enjoy making the bed either when i was a young man i used to like putting the sheets on the bed but now i have a king-size bed
and i'm 49 i'm like fuck this thing is heavy like the most dangerous thing i do every day
or anytime i put the sheets on and off i let my wife do it she's stronger than me okay sorry go
ahead well see this was this was yesterday she uh my kids went to dance
and then they were acting up afterwards so like that low that low is way lower than it ever would
be before because you're getting home pissed off then you got to go through the nighttime routine
and then once it's all over it's like oh, Oh, now we, now you got to make the bed before they, before they go to sleep.
It's like those little things that, that, that night before. Yeah.
We would never be at like that level of a low point. Yeah.
You might be like, Oh yeah, we got to do the dishes or something.
Or we might have some type of fight,
but then once you add, once you add like hours of work plus the kids the kids just like
do little things to piss you off all day like those lows are way lower than they were before
right so it's a it's a weird it's a weird experience like you're just everything is more volatile
are you are you religious man no no yeah you seem very um i wouldn't guess that you were but
but you never know and because you're so analytic you're very analytical right
yeah but you also are very deep like like you you you like you're not you want to scratch the surface.
So, well, see, I grew up my parents.
My parents didn't never force me to go to church or any type of religion.
But I had a lot of friends that were so I grew up, there was a large Mormon church in our town.
And so I was always I'm always just curious.
So a lot of, a lot of that stuff is, I find that, I find that there's kind of objectively
what's right and wrong, you know, and I kind of had the freedom to choose for myself. Like,
what do I think is right and wrong? So a lot of my friends, you know, friends watching their parents,
how they behave, seeing, you know, how they act and figuring out, you know, not this is right,
not because this book says it is, but just because it's the right thing to do or this is wrong not because this this other person
or book or or government says it's wrong it's wrong because it causes harm to these people
it's wrong because it has this impact religious people would say well what do you care where's
your moral compass like a lot of a lot of people who like believe in god will be like well if we
didn't have god everyone would just be out killing everyone and whenever they use that argument i'm like what really like i don't guy guy i get sad i cry when i
see someone catch a fish and pull it ashore and i see it's like struggling to breathe um
where does it come from then for you that that i think you called it objective but it's not
is it objective like how do you know
right and wrong if you're not religious if you don't if you don't like look to page 72 of the
bible is it okay to take this guy's cow no shit like how do you know what's your what's your
bedrock probably you know mostly you know you treat others the way that you want to be treated
that's one so i think didn't jesus say that isn't that like the foundation of the bible or something
or no i don't know i haven't read it all right i think it's in almost every religion
i know my mom pounded that into me as a kid treat people the way you want to be treated i mean that was that was like that was it golden rule the golden rule yep well there's the there's so
there's the golden rule and then i think i've picked it up somewhere in school about the
platinum rule of treating other treating other people the way that they want to be treated
ah so there's you know that's what i tell my wife my kid wants to be slapped what are you talking
about he's he's asking for it well see i tell my wife my wife complains and i said you're right
i'm treating you the way that i want to be treated if you did that to me i'm not going to complain
i'm not going to i'm not going to get upset if you do that so i'm 100 following the golden rule
if you if you want to do that perfectly fine you can if that's what you
want to do at two o'clock i'm okay with it i'm not going to be upset like you are right now
so i think i think most of that especially earlier in my life was about you know treating
other people how you want to be treated or thinking or putting yourself in their shoes.
But where does that come from?
Why do that?
Why not just – like how does someone like me or you know that and have that feeling or that intellectual understanding?
Or like it's just fucking made up.
These other people are doing it because God told them to do it.
Like why don't we just run around and beat people and take their wallets and be like, hey, it's just survival of the fittest.
It's the way it is.
What do you think makes it?
Go ahead.
I think it's an innate human ability.
You know, to know right and wrong, to know right and wrong.
Right.
I think that, you know, as humans, we are required.
We're social and we're required to cooperate in order to survive.
Our ability to survive relies on cooperation.
You know, you're not you're not going to make it very far as a single individual.
You at least need a small group.
So I think that we're hardwired for cooperation.
I think a lot of a lot of what we do, we don't view ourselves as animals and we don't view things as instinctual.
We don't view them as like automatic responses, but a lot of what we do is.
And so I think there's an innate drive to do good. There's an innate drive to treat other
people well, because in order, and this is purely self-interest, in order for you
to survive, you need these other people. And so you can't really be a jerk. You can't be
unlikable. You can't treat people that way because you're going to get cast from the group.
And if you're cast from the group and try to make it by yourself, you're not surviving.
That's a rare, exceptional individual that's going to survive 100% on their own for any length of time.
We're also designed in this way.
It's kind of like what you said about being humans.
To talk about one of the aspects of that is if I hate you, Graciano, then that hate is inside of me.
And so there's a price I pay for my bad behavior.
Am I willing – is my anger towards you because you parked your car on my lawn and broke my
sprinklers?
Is there like, how much hate do I want to give towards you?
Because there's a cost for me emotionally, intellectually, physically, health wise.
Like, what is that?
And we all see it.
So many people forget that too.
So like if my, when you don't like people, when you don't like your neighbor, let's say like
literally your neighbor, there's a price to pay. Every time you pull up in your house, it's
uncomfortable, right? And the most superficial, superficial level, there's a price to pay.
You don't want to see them when you look over the fence. You don't want to pull up at the same time
as them. Do you know what I mean? Whereas if you like your neighbor or if you love your neighbor,
it's great. Every time you see them, I had a friend call me the other day who I used to work
at CrossFit with.
And basically, I hadn't talked to them in a year because I was really upset with them.
And I'd held them to a standard that was probably not achievable for anyone.
And basically, he texted me and he said, hey, we need to talk.
So I called him and I was selfishly trying to squash the beef because I don't want to have ill feelings towards anyone.
There was a price I was selfishly trying to squash the beef because I don't want to have ill feelings towards anyone there was a price I was paying for that there was a price I was paying for having ill feel ill feelings towards someone it almost I to tell you the truth I actually have a little bit of
concern sometimes when I when I take the piss out of people on this show and then and that it sticks
to them like I want them to know like hey it's just a show I'm just joking we're just people
here you know I mean like people inside of the community,
because I turned this off and I walk away and I just go to the beach with my kids. So, so
sometimes I feel bad. Like if I take a shit in someone's brain and they're stuck with it for a
week. Well, I think it's interesting. And I, I'd like to address this comment here because, uh,
Sean was saying absolutely wrong. Um, look at history, like refuting the history. And I'm
going to recommend a book as I always usually do what's he referencing there he was referencing that the he was saying
about the innate ability to like how we feel so that's why we don't attack our neighbor like steal
their stuff right and if you read a book called sapien by you're all i can always mispronounce
his name but you're all the harari um it's a brief, I think the name of the book is like a brief history
of humanity. You'll find that once we started to have more abundance of what we needed for survival,
it allowed more room for conscious thoughts. Because like what Grastiano was saying is
sometimes we're just reacting, right? So if I'm super hungry or you're going to come after me to
get my kids and you need my resources. That's it right there.
Brief history of humanity or of humankind.
There's not a lot of room for conscious thought.
And what happens is, as in this is on a spectrum that you guys can look up on the conscious
level spectrum.
It's actually on my Instagram.
You could see it there too.
But basically, the lower your conscious level is like anger or if I'm sad or something,
that's still going to drive me to action, but these are low conscious level reactions.
And the more we have as abundance, like we do in the world we live in now, we have more room to
have higher level conscious and thought, which then allows us to have more room for those feelings
of the innate good in which you are talking about. So if you read
that book, that'll help give some more insight to that. And I don't believe that it had as much to
do with religion, although that played a massive part in it. It mostly had to do with our resources
and our communication. And the biggest thing that separates us, and he notes this in the book,
from the animals is our ability to cooperate on a much larger scale.
And also they say ants rock that shit, don't they?
They do. Yeah. But also, too, that's I mean, OK, fair enough.
Fuck me up there. But but but but a larger scale.
But but but but actually maybe you're right, because ants just have one anthill like on an acre and then they got to fight the other hands on the other acre and whereas we on we got the whole planet yeah and then sean also
said here have you guys been in a cave last two years and again if you look at it and there's a
a book i think it's called factfulness it'll actually take you through history and how as
a total we've become so much more peaceful than we were last year. So even though, Sean, the news, the corporate media, as our guests that we frequently have on Jorge Ventura calls it, says that, you know, the corporate media makes it look like everything's all bad. But if you really look at the facts, right, then you'll realize that we live in the most peaceful time ever okay and um and it is a lot better now than it ever has been in fact
even our poorest people when the united states especially still have access than the richest
person did just the more access to things than the richest person did just about 50 to 70 years
50 or 70 years ago 20 years ago exactly. Exactly. Ladies and gentlemen. With an iPhone and everything else.
Yeah.
That's a huge mistake, by the way, the left does.
And this is coming from a former hardcore liberal.
They just look at discrepancy of wealth.
That's a horrible fucking metric to isolate.
There's people now, the poorest people on planet Earth have what the richest people did not have 20 years ago.
Whackadoodles.
So I'll use your neighbor as an example.
Please.
You have to think about what allows you to be a jerk to your neighbor.
And the reason I can be a jerk to my neighbor is I don't need them for anything.
They don't do anything for me.
So if I don't need them for anything, I can treat them however I want.
They're a different tribe from me.
What allows me to be a jerk to them is that someone else built this house that I'm living in.
But if I needed my neighbor for us to build shelter together, I wouldn't be a jerk to them.
I'd suck it up and I'd get along with them and I'd help him out so I can be helped.
Someone else farmed your food. Someone drove it,
harvested it, drove it to the supermarket. Someone's working the supermarket for you to
come in and grab all that. I don't need my neighbor for food. If we had to farm together
or we had to hunt together, our differences would be not zero, but they'd be minimal.
They'd be small enough. I wouldn't care.
I need this guy to survive. I need this guy's help for the survival of my family.
And that's why I can be a jerk to this guy. I don't need him for anything because I have all
these other people that is doing something for me to survive. But if I didn't have a house,
is doing something for me to survive.
But if I didn't have a house, I didn't have food, I didn't have all these things, I'd get along real well.
So my wife is Portuguese.
Her parents come from the Azores.
They grew up without electricity.
So one of their traditions every year is they do a matanza, where they slaughter the pigs and they prepare the meat in a way that's going to last.
Now, does everyone love each other 100%? There's no disagreement?
Of course not.
But all throughout generations before then, they needed each other in that village to live.
So it doesn't even matter if you don't like them.
You're going to suck it up and be nice to them because everybody needs each other.
But now here in America, I don't need this guy.
What do I care if he doesn't like me?
What do I care if he doesn't want to cooperate with me?
I got all these other people working for my survival.
And so I can treat this guy like he's a separate tribe. I can say I hate this guy
and I don't like his beliefs and I don't like this and that. But if I needed him, like we used to
have to need people, all that stuff would go away. I'm like, yeah, we kind of disagree on this, but
it's not a big deal. So we're only looking at it from the perspective now where we've been completely segregated from nature.
But if you go back and we're talking 50 years ago, we're not even talking like hundreds or thousands of years ago.
We're talking 50 years ago where lots of places throughout the world didn't have electricity
didn't have the amenities that we have today and people within that village they got along a little
better you have you need those people for you to live these people didn't wake up and spend five
hours on twitter arguing with people and fighting people. Carrying all that hate inside of like
of
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Because, hey, I'm worried about making it to next year.
We got a drought going on. Now I really need this guy. So all of those things about how you hate your neighbor, a lot of that is possible because the infrastructure we have in the U.S. allows us to not need anyone else.
hey my neighbor when uh when i first moved into the house i'm in um there was a big rain and my roof started leaking and i told my neighbor next door he's a contractor and he came over
in the rain put a ladder up and fixed the leak in my roof in real time another time many many times
he's come over to my to my house with a dozen eggs from his chickens and and we are so far
politically not aligned and i fucking
love the guy and you nailed it i'm both the reason why i love him is for two reasons he helped fix my
shelter and he brought my family food and it's like yeah everything else is kind of out the door
yeah like at that point like like all my other shit's out the door he's got you know he's got
five kids i've got three kids like mean, that's some really cool shit.
And he left his ladder over here and said I could keep it because he's got like 20 ladders.
That was really cool.
What a good dude.
Do you have siblings, Graciano?
Yeah, I have an older brother and I have a sister who passed away.
And your brother's 11 years older?
Correct. And was your sister 11 years older? Correct.
And was your sister older or younger?
She was older.
She was 10 years older.
And how old were you when she passed away?
16.
Did you know her well?
Yeah.
So she was 26?
Yeah, 26.
Wow. And is that a huge impact on you is that like just a massive life-changing moment yeah at the time so that's a that's a big driver of a lot of different
stuff that's certainly part of the reason why I coach CrossFit.
So my sister passed away due to obesity.
And so a lot of, a lot of, of.
Can you explain that better?
She's 26 years old and she passed away from obesity, like ate herself to death.
Yeah.
Explain that to me.
It, uh, so for instance, her death certificate reads complications of morbid obesity wow so that's what they should read that's what many of them should have read for the last two
years a lot of them yeah and so it's hard to pinpoint something exactly to say like this is this is what happened.
It's also.
It's.
It's hard to pinpoint an exact cause.
There's multiple issues that that occur when you're at that weight.
You also.
How heavy how heavy was she?
Got to be 300 pounds at five two okay so not was she mobile was she mobile yeah yeah okay
you know our family's really strong so it's there's a difference between mobile for
for an athletic person versus versus someone that doesn't have that, you know, that level of,
you know, I don't want to say physical fitness, but strength, you know, right. So
in that case, I go back to what was it? I remember reading a lot of the old CrossFit journal,
and it's broken down. It's about health between lifestyle and
luck. And so at 26, you're likely to have some type of genetic issue that makes you more susceptible,
but with a different lifestyle that may not be an issue. That may not be the breaking point.
So you can have some type of genetic condition where you live with it
just fine until you're 70 that never hits like the you know the breaking point but you add poor
lifestyle factors on top of that and these things pop up you know these things these you know you
add uh that's that's you know your your weakest link in the chain so So I think it was what I think in Glassman's article,
he puts it like 70% or 80% of your health is a lifestyle.
And the other 20, 30% is luck.
So there's a combination of lifestyle and unlucky to die of obesity at 26.
But for a lot of people, they don't see, you know, they don't see,
they don't see that same thing when people are 40 or 50 or 60. They're always looking at like,
what is the, you know, kind of like what is the acute cause or what is the most,
what is the closest issue, like what actually happened without looking at what led up to it.
So for instance, if someone dies of lung cancer,
we automatically assume it's smoking.
Say, oh, you died of lung cancer, you died of smoking.
So, and I think it was 20% of lung cancer,
20% of lung cancer deaths are unrelated to smoking.
So it's not 100%, but we all know that so much of
those deaths are smoking that. That's the assumption. Especially if you smoke. If you
smoke, you get lung cancer, we automatically say you didn't die of lung cancer, you died of smoking.
And as a society, we all recognize that. But then when it comes to issues related to lifestyle and in particular obesity, we never go back and be like you died because of these lifestyle choices or your nutrition.
It's always this person died of a heart attack.
This person died of this or they died.
This person died of COVID.
Right.
right so someone if you know someone's an alcoholic they die they die of liver cancer you're like well you know this is what caused it but there's a whole host of issues we never
look back and say hey you know they died because they have a poor diet it's always something else
that takes it off of what caused it even Even something, someone getting hit by a car.
You're 150 pounds overweight and you get hit by a car and you die.
If you wouldn't have been 150 pounds overweight,
you may have had the awareness, the agility to not get hit by the car.
You would have maybe crossed the street faster, slower.
You also could have recovered faster.
Yes.
Taken the impact.
Yes.
It's fascinating the massive handicap obesity
um gives a human being it's it's it's like it's like wearing the world's largest weight vest with
you at all times yeah for instance my when i was 20 my appendix ruptured. And so I went in, you know, did the surgery. Wow. That's scary. I had this,
I had this giant tube in my stomach. It sucks out all the fluid.
And I remember I was working at the post office at the time and everyone there is over 50 years
old. And so they found when, you know, I called and said, Hey, you know, this is what happened.
And so they found, you know, I called and said, hey, you know, this is what happened.
That could kill you, man.
Yeah.
And it happened fast.
Yeah.
So they're all thinking of it like, oh, dude, we just lost this guy.
He's the one taking all of our overtime and all this stuff and covering all this.
Like, we're going to go back to working all these hours.
So they had just written it off like, oh, dude, this guy's going to be out for like a month.
Because they're all thinking back when they were younger,
you know, what appendix surgery meant.
Right.
Slice you open.
And now the procedure is a lot less invasive.
But also, if you're regularly working out, you recover so much faster.
So my surgeon, once they've pulled that tube out which is the
absolute worst thing in the app in the world it's the most it's not painful but it's the most
uncomfortable feeling that i've ever experienced why is the tube up through your penis no you know
when you know when you fall in an elevator and feel like your balls go through your head
when you fall in an elevator right you drop oh yes yes yes yes yes it's like your balls go through your head? When you fall in an elevator? Right, you drop.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
It's like that by 100.
Ah.
So they pull this tube out and you're like,
it's not painful.
It just feels like your balls just totally leave your body.
It's like that elevator drop by 100.
Wow.
And it was a female surgeon, so she doesn't explain it she's like oh you know it
might be a little discomfort might be a little discomfort i had a i had to sit there for like
a minute thinking man what the hell just happened i'm free falling why are my balls in my throat
the job zone so she told me she's like look you know you know what you're doing
you don't have any movement restrictions just Just go off of how you feel.
So it only took me a couple of days.
I got up, started walking.
I was back to normal.
I wouldn't say normal, but I could do all daily activities as soon as they pulled that tube out.
So I was like 10 days afterwards.
You know, I'm good to go.
afterwards, you know, I'm good to go. And a lot of that is when you're training hard and your body's constantly repairing itself, it's not just limited to training. When you get hurt and do
these things, you recover better from these accidents as well. If you get hit by a car,
something happens like your appendix ruptured, you recover faster. You don't have complications.
You don't have blood clots from sitting there for a week not doing anything.
You don't have all these other issues that pop up.
So it's really tough to separate those things out to say,
oh, this is from the car accident or this is because you're unhealthy.
Your body doesn't know how to repair itself.
Why didn't anyone tell your sister why didn't
your sister stop eating or change your diet i think and this is this is from a from a societal
perspective you know at large i think a lot of the conversation gets is too much based on
you know food environment and these other things. I think people, when they
get to that point, more of it is about mental health than it is about the food. So I was 300
pounds because I love to eat. I still love to eat. I thought it was because you wanted to be strong.
I thought it was because you want to be strong. That that's a justification. Oh, right, right,
right. I like to eat. eat you know you're following the
anabolic window getting your protein in after the workout all that other nonsense
but someone like me that i'm not very i don't i don't do moderation well
it's like well shit i'm gonna really maximize this window right now
so like three sandwiches with six pieces of bread in a row instead of just like.
Yeah.
It doesn't matter what it is.
Right.
Right.
So for someone like me, I can easily make that switch and be like, all right, this isn't helping me anymore.
I can make that switch.
It's not a big deal.
As soon as you as soon as, you know, I believe, hey, this is having a negative impact on the training.
I can I can easily switch and be like, all right, I'm just not going to eat that much.
I'm not going to eat all that stuff.
For a lot of people, they can't make that switch that easily.
It's because they're not eating to either support a certain lifestyle or to support doing these things. A lot of people that I have seen who are, who,
you know, we're not talking 20 pounds overweight, we're talking 50 or a hundred plus
food becomes a coping mechanism. So it becomes a way to deal with anxiety. It becomes a way to
deal with depression. It it's, it's beyond just the food itself. So you need to treat the underlying cause of that, not just look at it from, hey, we need to sit we need to sit them down with a nutritionist.
Like that shit doesn't work.
And the failure rate is so high that it just get rid of it.
It's not a food issue.
It's some other line issue.
They know that what they're doing right now is not healthy.
They know that this shit's no good for them.
It's just that they don't have, you know,
I don't like using the word motivation,
but they're not able to do the actions that would make the difference in this.
So you need to get to the underlying cause of that.
Not just be like, Oh, they don't have the knowledge.
No, no, you know that Big Macs are no good.
That's not – they'll tell you that.
Apply that to your sister.
So what you're saying is that your sister was eating.
It's more than just telling her to stop eating or just – like you're saying that food was a coping mechanism.
But doesn't dying transcend all of that? So I'm like I'm giving you like, you know, like I'm smoking cigarettes and I get a sore throat and I'm like, oh, shit, I have cancer.
So I quit smoking.
Like it's like there's there should be shit that scares the bejesus out of you and you do a course correction.
Yeah, but and this is this
is going to go back we'll tie this into covid okay usually there's a progression of that
so people go through a progression of i'm kind of sick i go to the doctor they're like hey man
you need to make some changes you know this is going to take 10 years off your life but if you're
30 and they tell you that and they're like oh, oh, you know, instead of living to 75, you're going to live to 70. It's not really, it's not an urgent
thing you got to change. Like I don't, on my day-to-day life, the impact isn't big enough.
And I still got, you know, 20 years before I really got to do something about it. But then you get to 35, then you get to 40.
As you get older, the ability to make those changes becomes less.
The impact on your health becomes more.
And now that time frame kind of shortens up.
So then when you're 40, they're like, hey like hey man you need to make a change now
ah yeah okay doc then it's you know 45 50 before they're like the doctor gets serious enough to
say hey if you don't stop this right now you're gonna die in the next year like your blood
pressure is here you cannot maintain this anymore you must stop right now and so there's kind of in terms of knowledge it's not you know
the food issue we've now allowed the narrative to be a health at any size which is just utter
nonsense that stuff is total nonsense it's abusive it's abusive it should be yeah it's abusive
so we've allowed that.
What do you think about parents who let their kids get obese?
Sorry, finish that train of thought.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
We've allowed that.
So we've allowed that to take root because we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and we don't want people to feel bad.
But lying to people is not – there's nothing nice or kind about lying.
Right. And a lot of people know it's a lie
doctors know it's a lie trainers know it's a lie all these people know it's a lie like you
think doctor you think doctors know it's a lie oh it's a lie okay well i i've you know i think
i think 50 of doctors don't know that but go ahead if it's not a lie they're being willfully
ignorant okay you can't you can't continue to see people come in that are obese, that have these issues, and continue to see people come in that aren't and don't have some of these issues and pretend like, oh, well, you know, your weight doesn't have any impact on your health or your diet doesn't have any impact on your health.
So they may genuinely not know, but they're choosing not to know.
There comes a point where the data becomes so overwhelming.
You're choosing not to look at this.
You're choosing to ignore it.
How about one of these leaders of one of these countries that just said,
it's too hard losing weight.
Maybe it was even our leader. Maybe it was Biden. It's too hard losing weight. Maybe it was even our leader. Maybe it was Biden.
It's too hard losing weight. Just go ahead
and get the vaccine.
I saw that. I saw, or maybe
our CDC said that. Someone said that.
It's fucking nuts.
It's too hard, blah, blah, blah.
Just go ahead and get the vaccine.
I just spilled coffee on my keyboard that's what i was talking about
it was new york city i think okay i mean that's crazy that is
i believe in total freedom of speech total freedom of speech but maybe there should be a different
standard for our leaders i don't know i don't know. But that's crazy to say that.
That's crazy.
You should never – anytime anyone hears another human being arguing another human being's limitations, you should immediately start with the baseline that that's a vile human being.
Those were vile statements that came out of that person's mouth.
Oh, yes.
Thank you.
That was the British PM.
Yes.
You should never argue another person's limitations for yes thank you that was the british pm yes you should never argue
another person's limitations for them never ever ever it makes you a pile of shit i can't stand it
well okay go ahead you know in regards to that vaccine matt do you remember swine flu i do want
to circle back to your sister by the way yeah we'll get to it so with swine flu you know that was 2009
and swine flu was the pandemic prior to this one so that's an 11 year gap
so at the very least you know what regardless of what you think about you know our pandemic response
your plan for not an if we're going to have another, if we're going to have another pandemic, but we're going to
have another pandemic and your plan should reasonably be, okay, we just saw two pandemics,
11 years apart. You should at least have as a plan, we'll have a pandemic in 2031, maybe later,
maybe sooner. We're already two years of COVID. So what are you going to do in nine years when
the next one happens? Are you going to follow that same response? If you're 40 right now and
you're not secure about your health, you're going to be worse off in nine years when you're almost
50. So what are you going to do when you're 50 and the next one happens? You're going to do all
these things and more. The next one could be more dangerous this was your
wake-up call right this one wasn't even dangerous at all imagine if there were people dead on the
streets i still don't know anyone who's died sorry go on so that should be you know that should have
been as far as the weight loss goes if they would change that message to hey what's going to get us
out of this one is these things but long term you need to get healthy. You're not going to get healthy fast enough
that this won't impact you, but another one's coming. Not maybe, another one is coming.
You should plan for that one to come 11 years because we had swine flu this one at least have a plan in place for 2031
or around that range what are you going to do then right now we're going to not now we've allowed it
to be like oh your overall health status makes no difference and so we're two years in by the time
and we're never going to admit it at this point hey it's worse it's worse than
that there's there's there's people in the mainstream media who make fun of people who
say that fitness and diet are the answer like there's those of us who know that if you if you
eat healthy and take care of yourself there's no there's no there's no possible way this will kill
you and yet there's people in the media who make fun of us saying that that's fucking like a conspiracy theory or lunacy.
It's 100% true.
It's 100% true, but they take like the craziest people of a group to represent them.
So they'll take some lunatic like Liver King and be like, oh, look at what this fitness – this is what fitness people are like.
Look what they think.
Well, it was Marjorie.
It was, it was Marjorie Taylor green.
It was the lady who got accused of saying that Jews are shooting lasers out of
their eyes to start forest fires.
She was the one she owned a CrossFit gym.
I think, I think she even maybe was partners with Travis mayor.
I apologize, Travis, if that's incorrect.
I apologize if it is correct.
But, but they, she was basically, they were making fun of her for exercising on her on her social media.
It's like, are you fucking kidding me?
That's exactly what we need from our leaders.
Yeah, I remember that.
They made fun of a lot of people for working out.
I mean, how how sad was it that when Trump got covid, he didn't say, hey, I'm a fat fucking pile of shit.
I'm concerned.
That would have been awesome.
I mean, Trump's son knows.
Junior knows.
He's smart as fuck.
He gets it.
But it was a waste on Trump's part
that he didn't fucking lose 50 pounds in front of us all.
I would have loved him if he had done that.
You watch any of Tyson Fury's's press conferences yeah yeah i think
the absolute best part he gets up there he's like look how fat i am what a fat disgusting
i love how he always has his shirt off he so he had one with he had one with klitschko where he's
like look at what a fat bastard i am and you lost You lost to a fat slob that can barely move,
grabs his love handles and shakes them.
So at the time, I was hoping that Trump would get on there
and be like, look, I survived this thing.
Look at this.
I don't know anything.
You know that fucking dude wears a girdle.
You know Trump wears a girdle.
I bet you he's even bigger
Like you just pull that string
And that shit would just pop out
He'd be like a fucking humpty dumpty
So I was expecting that
I was expecting
I was expecting more
More antagonism
Of just like oh I told you guys
That's the one kind of part That was missing from Trump He needed to be a little more More antagonism of just like, oh, I told you guys.
That's the one kind of part that was missing from Trump.
He needed to be a little more self – he doesn't have any self-deprecation in him, right?
It's just all bravado and ego.
You've got to have a good balance.
Yeah.
It would be – Did you ever tell your sister does your sister know that she died like
i know this is does your sister know that she died of obesity like did she know it was killing her
uh not really because it happened pretty quick it did that's uh that's a there's like i said a lot
of people i think so she probably thought hey i'll make it to 40 but she didn't right so there's a lot of
people have a runway yeah sorry sorry we had Jack Jake Hegel on the other day and he was like fuck
I'm just gonna eat myself to die and die at 40 like that's what he was thinking and then something
happened to him he's like fuck that I'm losing weight well like I said I think with the health
issue a lot of people think there's going to be a runway.
So, for instance, with COVID, that was your, you know, you're thinking like, oh, you're going to go to the doctor and you're going to have time to make these changes.
But then COVID happened and everyone got caught.
There's a saying that you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide pulls back.
Everybody got caught swimming naked.
Oh, shit.
I haven't been going to the gym.
I haven't been eating well. I haven't been sleeping well.
I haven't been doing all these things I know I should be doing.
You're insecure about it.
You're unsure.
I felt healthy a month ago,
but now that we're going to have a test of health, now that we're going to figure out how that's going to play out, then it's like, ooh, I wasn't expecting this.
I was expecting –
I like that, a test of health.
We're going to do a test.
We're going to spread a minor virus around and see who survives.
So a lot of that stuff was – Let's not call it a pandemic anymore it's the
great health test of 2020 dude let's rebrand that shit so in that case if people who were confident
in january you know april rules around they're not confident anymore because now it's real. Before it wasn't real.
Before it was, hey, there's nothing in my daily life that I have to – I'm impacted in any way.
But now you have this virus going around.
Now it's real.
Now it's a little different.
And I don't think – I think very, very few people were ready for that because we get people in that are, you know, they start at 40, but they've had health issues for 10 years.
We're like, yeah, you know, I went to my doctor. He said, my blood pressure is a little high, but it doesn't stop there. The blood pressure is a little high, but not, not high enough. You're really causing severe damage at the time. It's just going to slowly accumulate.
Yeah, the doc said, you know, my A1C was a little too much.
But, you know, he didn't tell me that I'm going to die.
He just said, you know, I need to get this down until you're 40.
And it's like, hey, these numbers are totally out of whack.
You need to make a change.
So people generally have some type of runway before the need to make big changes happen.
And sometimes people don't.
Sometimes it's quick.
And you never saw it coming.
So that goes back to the same thing with the luck and the lifestyle aspect a little extra luck maybe she
makes it to 30 and something happens that's hey i gotta i gotta get my shit together right now
and do these things and some people make it there some people don't but i think i think that's um
i can't speak from experience because I haven't gone through a period of some type of mental health disorder.
But I think it's more related to –
Wait. Say that last sentence again.
You've always had a mental health disorder?
No, I haven't.
Oh, you have not.
I have not.
So I can't tell you the mental state you're in when you're 400 or 500 pounds, but it's easy to see like, hey, this isn't like a lack of movement or a food problem.
There's some other issue.
And of the people who we've come in, we don't deal with people that have 200 pounds.
What do you mean?
Like you were raped at 10 years old or you saw your brother get killed or is that what you mean by some other issue? And then and then you you ate as a coping mechanism for that. There's some emotion. OK, OK, OK.
Some some type of other issue because. OK, does it have to be that severe, do you think?
No, you know, it doesn't have to be OK. I think I think it could be just your dad yelled at you it could
be just your dad got drunk and passed out he never even yelled at you you were never molested but
your dad came home every night got drunk and passed out and then you would go to the fridge
and eat a little bit next thing you know you're fucking 30 years old you've been raising yourself
since you've been four because you're single that you live with your dad needs you drunk all the
time and so you ate yourself and okay it could you know a case like that it could be as simple
as you never received that love as a child and you don't love yourself.
You don't have your own self-respect and see yourself as, as valuable of these things.
Right.
So it doesn't need to be anything severe, but we don't have, I mean, we don't have people,
not that we don't, we wouldn't people that have 200 pounds to lose.
They don't make it into the gym.
Like they never actually
get their foot in the door for us to help them but we have people that are at lesser extremes
and a lot of times the issue is not the food a lot of times the issue is is i eat when i'm anxious
i eat when when this happens um for me if i for me it's i stay up too late for me if i just went to bed on fucking on
time i probably would eat 500 less calories a day like i start to get tired it's nine o'clock at
night i haven't done my enough research on graciano rubio coming out i stay up from nine to eleven
and i eat a fucking pound of cashews oops yeah you don't have a weight problem uh but you know
what i mean i'm no i'm
no fucking matt suza you know what i mean see if you're eating because you're bored that's not that
hard to solve it's not even bored it's a i'm looking for like some sort of well i don't know
what the reason but some sort of spike right some sort of like some sort of it's like it's like you
know um we have this we have this gum that sits in our center console when we're dry for in our car.
And like, I don't chew gum, but like if I'm starting to nod off, I'll throw a piece in.
And it gets me through like five minutes, right?
Just just that that stimulus.
Did your sister's death rock anyone to the rock anyone in your family to the point where they made a massive lifestyle change?
I can't imagine your parents, man.
Are both your parents still alive, your mom and your dad?
Yeah.
Yeah, man, that's got to fuck with you.
Do they ever recover from that?
Do your parents ever recover from that?
How long ago was that?
That was 14 years ago. Yeah. Do your parents ever recover from that how long ago was that that was 14 years ago yeah do your parents ever recover or no oh they're fine they are i mean there's there's a certain aspect of
you have to you kind of have to define recover you know what i mean i don't think like they can
have fun with their life like do you see your parents laugh like yeah okay it's not just fucking a black cloud and it's heavy at all times
no no it's not like that at all okay um my mom my mom has always been extremely positive
so it's very i mean it was hard at first, but she's doing quite well later on.
My dad, it's hard to describe my dad because he grew up poor.
So his dad was murdered when he was a kid.
That's part of why he came to the United States.
Well,
he was murdered in Mexico.
Yeah.
So to him,
his life was a little harder and rougher.
A little.
So it's not,
it's not that he's a little more callous to some,
to certain things.
So it's not something that it's not something that,
you know, you don't, you don't really get over it, but it's something that you
can deal with. So for him,
it's kind of, you grow up
in that environment. You're more used to people dying. You're more used to hardship.
So I would say he moved on a, he, he moved on a little,
I don't say move on, but he recovered a little quicker. My mom did well. And I think this is,
this is an important point. Like when people deal with death, people always bring up this idea of
writing your own story. And so when you look at someone's death and how they live their life,
And so when you look at someone's death and how they live their life, you have the ability to shape what that death meant.
So I actually have a friend of mine.
I have a friend of mine.
We went to middle school together.
She just died of a brain injury.
Wow.
A week ago.
Vaccine, vaccine.
Oh, shit.
And when things like that happen, your actions afterwards can determine what that death meant.
So when you look at someone dying, that's a huge reason why I'm here in the gym helping other people with their fitness.
Because I know that the value that it brings, I know that this person losing weight, getting fitter changes their life so dramatically.
And it's not something that's usually quantified. You can't say like, Oh, this is how much this is worth. Because I put health at number one, if you don't have health, you don't have anything.
So giving, helping, being open here and helping people with that,
that is how, you know, that is, that's one of the reasons of why I do it. So same thing with
my other friend, she was, she was the absolute kindest person I've ever met in my life,
but by far, there's not, there's not a single person that I could say has that kind of energy.
So to me, when these things happen, you need to take that and then use your actions afterwards for that death to have caused good.
And it's very difficult for people to say that someone dying is good, but we're all going to die.
A lot of us are going to
die. And we hope that how we lived our lives makes a difference on the next generation. You know,
we hope that our kids have it easier. We hope that our kids strive for more. And so I take that
belief of people living their life to 80, hoping that they get a full, all the years that they're,
that they can get out of it and all the difference they make and use how that person live to make a difference in yourself.
How would they want you to live? How would they want you to act? How are you different now because of what they did?
So part of, you know, part of the recovery process is.
Those actions you take afterwards.
You can sit around and drink and be miserable, or you can learn from it.
It's hard to look at any positive or good aspect of it, but there's a good aspect to everything.
Almost everything has good and almost everything has bad so to reduce that bad you need to find the good you
need to find how do i take this and do something about it yeah and a lot of that's out of your
control but what is in your control to you know further um talk about your point there is the way
you respond to what happened right like you still have a choice on how you want to respond to these external events that are far without
your control. Will, if you're watching at 157.34,
Graciano says, if you don't have health, you don't have anything. That's something my mom,
you know, that's another thing, the golden rule.
And your parents tell you when you're a kid, your health is the most important thing.
And it's funny because I just ignored my mom.
And the three things, I just ignored my mom on all that shit.
It's funny how she's right, you know.
It's weird.
I got to think of a different way to say it to my friends.
Graciana also said something very fascinating to me about how you can take someone's death and use that story to make change.
Like, look at this guy. He was a he he was a porn star. He was a drug addict.
He was a he put a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach in a home invasion robbery.
He drove around neighborhoods selling fentanyl. He drove around neighborhoods high on fentanyl high on meth high on alcohol and um and and in in he was uh and he died um and he's turned into
a civil rights leader it's amazing what you could do with someone's life george floyd i mean complete
fucking added zero contribution to society and society's taking this guy afterwards and turn him into a civil rights leader anything is possible fucking a fucking a
it's the worst advice you've been given in the show graciano do not listen to graciano about
that part about taking someone's using someone's death because some fucking idiot's going to use
it wrong graciano is using his sister's death to help people and they're using george floyd's death
to fucking make this country a worse
place. To make it a black
and white thing. There's nothing that, don't ever look
at George Floyd's skin. I wish he would have been
white.
Fucking zero
contributors to society.
If you put a gun to a woman's stomach
in her house
in an armed robbery,
you are at the bottom of the
fucking food chain that's what that's what i think i think i unless i mean your redemption
has to be massive this guy this is no malcolm x malcolm x went to jail and then fucking copied
the dictionary word for word in his spare time to turn into a sorcerer and a magician with the english language
that's a story of redemption if you want a fucking uh a hero sorry george you didn't have enough time
to fucking redemption not my problem how would you feel how do you feel about people driving
around your neighborhood graciano high on meth high on on fentanyl, with your son in the street on his
tricycle. What's your tolerance level for that? My tolerance level is zero. This is California.
My tolerance level is zero, too. Do you hear that, people? There's a big, big, big, big
difference. You do not get what's going on now if you don't if you have any tolerance for
someone driving around your neighborhood high on on alcohol or fentanyl you're you're not even
into i get it you're 19 years old you're smoking weed and your peace and love but but you're
completely out of touch i was there too you'll snap out of it when you have a kid well we have
you have a lot of work to do this is we'll go i'll bring up a covet death for you okay please
and i'm very sorry
about your sister and i appreciate you sharing it here um obesity is no fucking joke there is
one thing guaranteed if you are obese i will tell you this you will die prematurely
go ahead sorry covet death so this was april of 2020
and california had the bright idea that they were gonna sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry
sorry um seven how hilarious would it be if you were next after joe by next you mean being the
greatest podcaster you've ever lived that would be awesome i would love to have joe's problems
right now i would love to have joe's problems right now please please lord jesus 100 million
dollar deals 100 million dollar deals 100 million
dollar peter pan yes yes me give me give me cancel me away again every time you cancel me i'll come
back stronger like fucking highlander okay sorry sorry i'm i interrupt a lot that's part of the
show so this was california had the bright idea that they were going to let people out of jail because of coronavirus.
So they said, hey, these guys, we can't have too many people in jail, so we need to get rid of some of these people.
And no one ever thought more than one step ahead.
So they said, wait a second.
This guy was a criminal in good times.
a criminal in good times.
Now we're going to release them out into the public with the whole,
everything is shut down. How are they going to provide for themselves?
They can't get a job. There's, there's nothing for them to do.
Everything is shut down. So they're not going to be able to get a house.
They're not going to be able to do anything, but we get to pretend that we care so much and all these things. So we're going to ignore the fact
that why we put them in prison in the first place or any of those other issues.
We're just going to release people. So
they release the guy. Two days later,
this guy shows up at my in-laws
dairy.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Hold on.
It gets better.
Wait, tell me what's a dairy.
What's a dairy?
Cows. It's a cow farm.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, he tries to rob somebody.
One of the employees.
Cuts his throat. Guy runs off with the wallet oh he cut one of your
in-laws employees throats yeah how's he gonna get money to provide for himself right a job
leaves.
That is his job.
Two days later,
two days later,
and he learned this.
This is a,
this guy was a career criminal.
Started off as a normal guy.
You look at his rap sheet. It starts off real small at like 18,
slowly creeps up,
slowly gets worse,
slowly gets worse.
He was in jail for setting a cop car on fire.
Well, two days after this attempted murder, he's at another dairy, tries to rob someone.
He murders this guy.
Same thing.
Asks him for his wallet, tells him to take his jacket off.
As he's taking his jacket off and can't get it off, he cuts his throat. Defenseless guy. This one's even worse. This one's like directly on
camera. Steals the wallet. The local PD kind of have an idea of what may have happened because
they know this guy. They've dealt with him a bunch of times, get a warrant, go to his apartment,
recover everything. You know, they recover the wallets, they recover.
I think they ended up recovering the weapon. So he's now out for,
he's now gone for life.
And this is a direct result of those policies.
We shouldn't, you know, Hey hey we got to reduce the population in the
jail here you go what are they supposed to do i don't know but we get we get kudos for
being so being so whatever well he ends up trying to kill someone and then kill someone
there's dozens of these stories the rape ones are the most painful so how close to home is that for you crazy
and you know the other crazy part no one cared no of course not if it's not your brother that
got killed your sister that got raped why would you care so all these people that go on and on and on about these issues.
When this one popped up. Zero, there's total crickets, nothing whatsoever, nothing of like, hey, you know, it's just not my problem.
As well, it is your fault, though. It is the fault of these people that that let this guy out of jail when he
should have been in there he said if you set a cop car on fire what do you think that how do you
think this guy's going to behave you know letting them loose in the middle of a pandemic and in
california where you can't do anything i i want to i want to throw go ahead graciano i want to
explain something.
Well, no, that's so when it comes to all these these drug issues and these other things that we're all three of us are dealing with in California.
Yeah, there's this idea of of compassion is just totally misguided.
totally misguided. Like it's really a lot of this compassion comes into allowing people,
not, not compassion in terms of helping people, but we're going to allow these people to suffer.
And you're supposed to just keep paying your taxes and watch these people suffer.
And the money just goes to some, whoever's running whatever outreach program,
but they don't do anything. I want to explain something and this is going to upset my wife she really hates it when i say this even though she doesn't agree with me so i'm going
to try to say it in the kindest way possible first of all i want to say this thing i i believe and i
don't i don't hate any of you guys for it but i believe that if you are um pro injection the
opposite of pro injection is not anti-vax i want to be very pro-injection is not anti-vax.
I want to be very clear.
There's no such thing as anti-vax.
That's word fuckery.
If you're pro-injection, if you're pro-mask,
if you participate in quarantine,
if you participate in any of that,
I do believe that you are part of the narrative that got this guy fucking killed.
That's where we're at.
The whole narrative,
well, Stefan, I didn't get the vaccine.
I just wore the mask.
Because it says so on the door, I believe you are participating.
I believe you are complicit.
Have I ever worn a mask?
Yes.
Yes.
I've worn a mask into a grocery store now and again.
I have also been complicit.
There's no reason to push back and deny.
Same thing I've told you a million times.
I know this.
I suspect this iPhone is made with child labor.
I'm complicit.
Don't lie to yourself.
Just stop being complicit.
Stop participating in the fucking lying narrative.
Now, I want to – the other thing.
There's a scale here, right?
It's a scale like this, and it's teeter-tottering like this.
And here you have the virus, and it's danger.
And over here you have the cure. So you want to load
up the cure. Like what, what, what, what is going to be the cost of stopping this virus?
Well, first of all, let's describe what the virus is. The virus is something that kills people in
the United States who the vast majority of them over 99% are complicit in their demise. What do
I mean by that? They live a lifestyle that is what made them susceptible to the virus.
So they're responsible for that.
On top of that, the average age is somewhere within a year of the average age of death already in this country.
So what are you willing to do to save people who are 80 years old who are now dying at 79 by this virus?
save people who are 80 years old who are now dying at 79 by this virus 40 of them are in care facilities and they have a 13 month life expectancy regardless of the virus what are you willing to do
to save them you're willing to mask children to save these people who are going to die on average
within the next year anyways who are 30 years complicit in their demise? Are you out of control? But why did this guy have to die at the fucking dairy farm?
Why did one man have to die to even save 800,000, 2 million, 3 million people
who are 30 years complicit in their demise who didn't take precautions?
It's fucking insane.
Your cure to help people who are 30 years complicit in their demise,
so some fucking poor guy who's fucking working his ass off in a fucking dairy farm or some woman who was raped because you let some guy out of fucking jail.
I wouldn't – I'd let all – and this is the part my wife doesn't like.
I'd let all those people die.
You all die to save – so that the kids don't have to wear masks.
So one kid
there's kids who've worn masks three years in a row
at school if ten of those
commit suicide over the next ten years
the whole fucking pandemic was a joke
and fucking all the masks and quarantines
and shots and everything you were complicit
if you partook in my opinion
I'm not
into saving 80 year old people at the cost
of kids I am not i
have no tolerance for it i think you're equivalent to pedophiles now you're you're like you like you're
like the chinese um you know horror stories of harvesting organs from young people that's what
you're doing you're fucking gross sorry go ahead graciano and i'm not saying graciano or matt
agrees with me by the way don't drag them this. I apologize for having such a fucking wacky fucking idea with you guys on. But it's nuts. It is nuts that kids have to suffer for this bullshit.
that resources are finite.
They think that just everything is in abundance.
There's no limit to stuff.
You can have anything you want.
There's no cap to it because we've never had to deal with that.
And so right when COVID happened
and we're very clear about
we have this amount of resources to deal with
and people are so... We knew who was at risk. We knew before we
shut down. We absolutely knew that this, who's at risk and what we need to do to protect them.
There's absolutely clear on that. Before California had that very first shutdown order
that our governor jumped on and bragged about it.
We're the most progressive state and we're so wonderful because we're going to crush
people's businesses before anyone else does.
But the resources are finite and people are so attached to this idea of equity and that
everyone has to be treated the same.
Yeah, someone should have told your dad that, right?
Yeah.
Like, by the way, his dad,
Graciano would never be where he is right now
if his dad fucking relied on equity.
Not a fucking chance.
With finite resources,
every little bit that you put into protecting kids
or young healthy adults or anyone else who's not at
risk means that there's less resources to protect the people who are at risk. So my argument the
entire time hasn't been, oh, we should do nothing. We need to allocate those resources to their best
use. We don't have abundance. We don't have an excess of masks. So if you want a
mask, be clear about who should get them. If you want these restrictions, be clear about who we're
trying to protect and what we need to do to protect them. So for instance, I was at Costco like
three weeks ago. They added back senior hours.
So I got there in the morning thinking I could come to Costco and shop.
They made me and my three-year-old daughter wait out in the parking lot for an hour.
We didn't get to go in at nine.
We had to go in at 10.
They're like, oh, well, this is senior hour.
So let me get this straight.
The people who are most at risk, who are most likely to transmit it to each other, if they get sick, you're going to pack all those people in here at
one time. That makes sense to you guys? The people most likely to transmit it, all of you guys
come at one time so that we can increase the transmission.
Wait, wait, explain that to me because that does sound like a good idea to me explain to me why that's a bad idea because if they were in there with you wouldn't
that also be a bad idea when should they go like they should go whenever their normal time is
but but you shouldn't you shouldn't have a priority oh i see what you're saying it doesn't
matter whether you put all the old people in at once or you mix them either.
So you're saying the solution is either, right.
Okay, I see what you're saying.
It's smoke and mirrors.
If you got 500 people in the store.
Regardless of whether they're susceptible or not.
You'd rather have 250 healthy people and 250 old people mixed in than 500 old people because they're more likely to transmit it.
So just on a side note, what percentage of people do you think who shop at Costco are healthy?
I haven't been in there in five years and I'm assuming it's worse than it is now. But when I went to shop there last, I would say 5% were healthy. 95% were headed towards premature death fast you uh you have to first you're gonna have
to define healthy uh being able to uh run a jog a 400 meter track i would say and and then have
a conversation i'll be generous and say 10 so people are getting getting healthier since the last time I was in there. That's nice. Okay.
So, you know, for instance, Costco, like you're used to this like jumbo pack of everything.
And that's just how our society is.
But if you put yourself in, what are we trying to do?
We're trying to protect these old people.
You need to see that the restrictions on young people are reducing your ability to help them.
You can't make these people healthy by making these people unhealthy. And every little bit,
the mask that I wear means that old person doesn't get a mask. The vaccine that I get
means that someone in some poor country with terrible health care system isn't going to get a vaccine.
There's only so many doses.
But once you say, hey, you're going to have to not get it so that someone who's more susceptible can have that dose.
Then it's like, well, hold on.
Now you're talking crazy.
You mean I'm going to actually have to sacrifice?
No, no, that's not that's not how it goes.
Sacrifice? No, no, that's not, that's not how it goes.
So that comp,
that idea of things being limited just doesn't even comp,
doesn't even comprehend for most people. Like, what are you talking about?
I turned the, I turned the water on it. It flows endlessly.
There's no limit to this stuff.
And that was a huge argument at the beginning of it,
that all this stuff we've done for young people all this time, all this hand sanitizer, all of that stuff, all that money, all that stuff could have been going to helping the people actually at risk.
But instead, we said, hey, whether you're whether you're 18 and you're in great health or whether you're 75 and you got a month to live, we have to treat these people the same.
All my best friends call me when I'm on the podcast. Isn't that weird?
And that means they're not listening to my podcast.
It really, really fucking pissed me off. Hey, how do you,
I sort of see what you're saying, but like, I'm so, well, I really,
I see what you're saying, but I'm so like, don't believe that what you're saying but i'm so like don't believe that any i like the first thing you said when you started that that basically um
young people should not have to pay the price should be injured to to help society i i i agree
with that but what do you think let me ask you this let me jump to this um what how
how how do you how what's the justification?
There's this argument.
So people will say – so in California, they're lifting the mask mandate, right, with the caveat that if you can now – I think that you can now go indoors or in a couple days you can go indoors without a mask, but you have to be vaccinated.
Well, I don't understand.
What's the logic there?
Wouldn't you – wouldn't it just be that obese people have to be mad?
My logic is this. The obese and the elderly, but probably just the obese should have to wear masks because if they get covid, their symptoms are they have symptoms for longer and they have more exacerbated symptoms, meaning coughing, sneezing and spreading the disease and the mutations because it lives in them longer.
And the mutations because it lives in them longer. How does being vaccinated or unvaccinated relate to if you should wear a mask or not? What's their justification? Do you have any insight into that?
Well, if you're more likely to get sick, you're also more likely to transmit it.
Right. So then it would be obese people, not vaccinated or unvaccinated, right? That would at least be part of the question. So if you're going to say,
hey, this person's unvaccinated, so they have to wear a mask. Well, that same justification is,
well, they're unvaccinated. So we need to protect them. And you say, I want to take the risk. Oh, it's to protect them. Well, hold on. You say, I'll take the risk. I don't care. In fact,
not only will I take the risk, but if I get sick, I'll deny treatment. I won't even take the hospital bed. 100%. If I get it, I'm going to go home and this is a death sentence. So I'm just going to go home, eliminate myself from society and die in my bed.
Well, yeah, but you might transmit it to someone.
So if we're going to get into an argument about you need to wear a mask based on how much you would transmit it, then yes.
Anything that you apply to unvaccinated people needs to apply to people that are more likely to transmit it, period, which is old and obese.
And the bigger the nose you have.
So like I would be like a massive transmitter.
So there's like three factors,
nose size, obesity, and- Super spread out.
If you get to the door and they say,
hey, where's your vaccine card?
That's no different than them walking to the door
and say, hey, we need you to step on this scale.
We're going to take your height.
This is your BMI.
Hey, you got to wear a mask.
Sorry, that's the science. Or i just show my crossfit gym membership and i just get a pass i go fucking nuts because we've got we've got other places in the u.s
and it's way more tame people don't comprehend like comprehend like California is where a lot of states were like three months into this thing.
Like we're still at that level. Yeah. So, for instance, what's Los Banos like?
Are they are they do you guys have the mask holes there? All the mask Nazis?
The mask holes. It's worse. It is. Oh, yeah. So. So you live in scared country.
It is.
Oh, yeah.
So you live in scared country?
It's a very odd.
We actually had a mask mandate before the state did, our city.
Like CrossFit One Nation.
Like CrossFit One Nation.
Come on now.
So the city put in a mask mandate like two weeks into it and now we have people once there was no mandate
i remember going to the store 95 of people still wore it
like they've now conditioned to where like the government's supposed to step in and help
everybody right but where we are is different. So when we were,
we were fighting with the city council and we know the city council can't do
anything to help out our gym.
And I said,
you guys don't comprehend it.
Right.
The governor blames the county and the county blames the state.
So we get into this giant loop where the city council is like, Oh, we don't have any power to make decisions. It's all at the county and the county blames the state. So we get into this giant loop where the city council is like, Oh,
we don't have any power to make decisions. It's all at the county.
The county says, Oh, well, we don't have any power to make decisions.
It's it's the state. And then the state says, well,
we don't want to make decisions.
We want local leaders to step up and take care of their communities.
So we just go in this loop where the block never stops.
When you say they don't comprehend it, they don't comprehend the power of CrossFit.
Is that what you mean?
Comprehend what?
You said something about they don't comprehend it, and I kind of got stuck on that for a second.
You said they don't comprehend it, the people.
Anyway, okay, never mind.
Scratch that thought.
So we got into a battle with the city council.
The whole point was to demonstrate to everybody that you guys aren't doing anything at the county level to sway their decision.
When you guys, we were one of only like three people that wrote in against this stuff because most people just totally ignored the rules and kept operating.
I said, hey, we'll go.
We'll play the game.
We'll do it the right way.
We're going to follow the restrictions.
We're going to do all these things.
But you need to be open and transparent about why we have to do them,
what the rules are.
So the city council just tried to duck us and be like and ignore it.
So I just kept writing in.
Then we got to the point that i said hey if you don't give your consent for us to operate in the city
this city will officially be shut down longer than wuhan china
tomorrow our lockdown will be longer than china the crossfit gyms in china are open
where this originated.
And we are shut down.
How long was your gym shut for?
How long was your gym shut for?
84 days.
That was the first one.
Yeah.
Then a whole bunch of parking lot workouts in 100 degree weather.
Yeah.
Los Banos is hot.
The first one was 84 days. And I said, hey, we are now beyond Wuhan, China.
Now, you guys can argue and say it's the county's fault or whoever's fault it is.
But that is happening in your city.
And the reality is you guys won't say one way or the other because you want to reserve the right to send code enforcement out and bust their balls and give us a hard time, which they eventually did,
even though they're like, well, you know, we're not going to find anybody. We're not going to do
any of that. So you're not going to find people, but you are going to send code enforcement out.
You are going to write up a report. So if anything happens, you've got this paper trail and say,
hey, we were at their business. We were doing this and that. You know, these guys are just,
they're just troublemakers ah right there
crossfit livermore but then we go to the county you know we ride into the county
and the county's like oh well you know we don't make the rules and i said well if you guys have
no power then why are you collecting a state salary you're not doing anything you're just a
you're just a pr person yes Why don't you just post?
Why don't we just eliminate the city council?
Because you guys can't make decisions.
Why don't we just completely eliminate the county public health department?
Because supposedly you guys can't do anything.
And the state just sends out the notice and tells people what to do.
Because you guys can't do anything.
Save us our tax money.
Right.
Then we go to the state and the argument for the state is like, hey, the local people won't step up't do anything. Save us our tax money. Right. Then we go to the state and the argument for the state
is like, hey, the local people won't step up and do anything.
So
we're in this giant loop
nonstop
of no one takes
accountability. No one explains why this is
that. No one explains why we're doing this.
And it's all this
just, oh, well,
we're following the data, but you can't see, well, we're following the data,
but you can't see the data.
We're following the science, but we won't show it to you.
And when we've been to other states, it's just way more laid back.
It's just way more calm.
But here in particular, it's just like everywhere you go,
that level of anxiety is so high
you feel it in the room of like people wearing their mask still being uncomfortable
this fucking place did you i can you believe that he didn't get recalled
you mean the republican recall the white supremacist recall uh yeah and
how about the fact that how i mean i just can't imagine like i'm so confused so so you know he
was saying the weirder part the weirder part is when you look at 2020 and you look at the ballot
measures that we passed yeah if you asked Trump to vote in California,
he would have voted exactly the way that we passed every single ballot measure.
You look at those ballot measures.
Every progressive ballot measure –
Give me an example.
What do you mean?
I don't remember them at all.
Affirmative action.
We shut down affirmative action because we talk about how we want
all of these minorities
to do well but when it comes to your kids college application being denied because they're white
and you need to open up a spot for minority whoa whoa whoa hold on that's crazy talk that's another
great example like affirmative action is such a lie just say what it is and let's just be honest about it.
Just say what it is.
Do you want to allocate 5% of all the fucking call admissions to black people because of their skin color?
Let's just be honest.
Okay, I do, but that's racist.
Yeah, I'm okay with that bit of racism.
I want to do that for – I think that's okay.
Don't – stop fucking calling it fucking affirmative action.
Stop fucking lying and trickery.
Stop calling things things that
they're fucking not it's okay it's oh it's okay just to tell the truth but it's it's it's this
and that's the problem that's why no one's no one should be liberal anymore it's all feigning
kindness it's all feigning compassion it's all about tricking you same thing with homelessness
we don't have a homeless homeless uh problem in california we have a drug addict
problem why is it important to draw the distinction because you deal with drug addicts differently
than you deal with homeless people we have a massive drug addict problem giving them housing
isn't going to fix the problem they're still going to steal all the bikes they're still going to live
under the bridges like they're like yeah i just hate that shit yeah you're in i know
that's a little bit of a tangent but yeah it's it's fascinating it's how you couch things with
words it's the exact same thing with the covid response it's all just word fuckery i cannot
believe how many people fall for this shit ask what is something even when i heard sam harris's
response to joe rogan it's like even that guy that guy's supposed to be a neuro fucking science phd and he falls for the shit he starts off with
the premise that well joe isn't a scientist or a doctor dude you have no fucking moral authority
or any proven um elevation in your ability to make risk assessment or risk management or to
distinguish what's better or worse for society based on you being a scientist or a doctor none it's an enormous leap when you think that would
to to to think that way all you could argue quite odd the opposite quite eloquently
very convincing that actually doctors and scientists when they're put in the decision
making um place that their their their decisions are so fucking biased
that it only makes everything worse.
Just give us the information
and let someone who's an economist make the decision,
someone who can think logically.
It's the same thing if you ask a police officer,
hey, should I move to this neighborhood?
Well, he's not the person necessarily to ask
because all he sees is all the worst shit.
Someone was raped at that house,
a car was broken in there. Someone was stabbed
over there.
Part of that whole argument.
Thank you. If you're going to stand up
and agree with me, please go ahead.
Part of the whole thing is
if it saves even
one life, that was one of the trending
ideas. If it saves just one life, that was one of like the trending, you know, ideas. Oh,
if it saves just one life, but people don't comprehend that economists make those decisions
all the time. They never say it doesn't matter what cost it is. If it saves one life,
it matters the trade-offs. So when they set, when they set safety regulations,
take for instance, a car, all those safety regulations are set by saying, what is the cost?
You know, what is the cost to the consumer? What is the cost to the manufacturer?
What is the cost of this and how many lives is it going to save?
If we if we walked everywhere, we'd have less car accidents.
But we couldn't live 20 miles away from work. Right.
They're always making those trade-offs.
They're never saying, in no other time have we ever said if it saves just one life.
It's about the trade-off between the two.
In terms of COVID, you're going to lose lives because of the response.
You're going to lose lives because of COVID.
You have a trade-off between there.
How much do you want to trade off saving lives for COVID?
And how much are you willing to spend because of the response?
It was always a trade-off.
It was never an either or thing.
The relationship between, and just one of them, the relationship between unemployment rates
and suicide slash deaths of despair is well documented.
Economists have that relationship extremely well figured out.
So when you say, hey, we're going to shut down the whole economy, you already know that's costing lives.
There's not even a question on that.
That was not even arguable.
And it's actually quite commonly known amongst economists that it's the quickest way to start causing deaths in a society is to put it under economic distress.
And you'll see a massive spike in deaths.
Yes, yes.
So it was always like you just do these things and we're going to save lives.
No, you're trading those lives off.
And it's not a life as a life.
As harsh as that sounds, economists have always used different metrics.
One of them is quality adjusted life years. You don't see a kid the same way that you see someone 80 years old when you're setting
regulations. They're not considered the same thing. Just because that's not a normal part
of conversation doesn't mean that those decisions aren't happening. They are happening. That's why in California,
you have to have a rear-facing car seat for two years. And so anyone with young kids,
you got to drive this monster vehicle because rear-facing car seats are the absolute worst
thing in the world to deal with. Because they say, hey, that one-year-old is too valuable.
You're going to have to suck it up and deal with it because we want to reduce
these deaths. But economists have always made those trade-offs. They're going to look at someone
dying at 20 years and say, we lost 60 years of life. And they're going to look at someone dying
two years before their life expectancy, and they're not going to call those the same thing.
They're going to call them differently.
They're going to say,
we're losing 60 years of life on this.
We're losing two years of life on this one.
They've always made that distinction.
That has always been the calculation.
But somehow with this,
it's we're treating five-year-olds
the same way that we treat 75-year-olds.
Now, me personally, when I'm 75, I had my shot.
I had my opportunities.
I'm not going to say, hey, this kid needs to sacrifice the rest of their life so that I can squeeze another little bit out.
to sacrifice the rest of their life so that i can squeeze another little bit out i think so and and we're not saying that all 75 year olds have to be corralled over here and jump off the cliff on the
count of three there's there's there's a the the chances of dying at 75 from these things are still
extremely low especially if you take fucking severe actions right away what do i mean by
severe action stop eating added sugar stop eating refined carbohydrates and make sure you get out
and walk every day do not quarantine do not stay indoors that is the absolute worst thing you can do do
not put a mask on your face the vaccine i do as you please well here's now that we're almost at
year two i think their estimate was that the average person who died of covid had an average
life expectancy of three years left three in the united states i believe so okay i'm not i'm not
100 that that sounds right but there are there are still i was just i read a list of like a dozen
countries the other day where people the average age of death was actually of covid was higher than
the average age of death in the country which is just fat like switzerland which is just fascinating
to me that anyone with a brain could see that and think that there's anything to worry about,
but go on. Yes. Three years. Okay. Well, go ahead and ask all these people who are at risk
and say, Hey, is this how you want to spend two of your last three years?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Great question. Great question. In California, we're going to be three years before this is new normal. We'll be three years until we're at a new, you know, so-called new normal. Ask those people who were doing all this for to protect. Do you want to live like this for your last three years? Or do you want to take the risk and maybe have one great year left? Maybe have one year that you can see your kids and do all the normal things
that make life worth living.
Yes.
Versus,
Hey,
living in total fear,
hiding.
You got three years left.
Now you got two years left because you're not doing all the things that keep
you alive and healthy.
Is that how you want to spend it?
And I can almost guarantee you the answer is no,
because people that are old,
they're all taking the mask off.
They're all saying, what the hell are you guys doing? You guys are morons. That's not life.
That sucks. I'll take the chance. 100% of all the people I know that are beyond 65,
they're like, I don't know how much I got left. I'm not going to waste it hanging out at home
with nobody. I worked my whole life so that I could enjoy these years.
I'll take my chance.
When the vaccine comes up, I'll get it.
I'm going to avoid doing stuff I really didn't want to do anyways.
But they're continuing to do these things and looking at younger people saying, man, you guys are crazy.
You guys are totally out of your mind.
Yeah.
Hey, when your dad came to this country, how did he cross?
Did he cross the border legally or illegally?
Illegally.
Illegally?
How old was he?
14.
Did he do it by himself?
Yeah.
Fuck.
Where did he cross?
Do you know where he crossed?
What state?
That's crazy. A couple of different states you know where he crossed what state that's crazy a couple different states oh he crossed yeah he went back oh he did yeah he got picked up shit back a few times oh shit
he's the joke he got deported and then he said they just gave me a free bus ticket for a
hangout in mexico for the weekend because i was back to work on monday yeah so and this is you know for one of we'll dive we can dive into cultural appropriation
he came in at 14 years old i love cultural appropriation you should you should see my
rap library on my itunes oh it's massive you remember the whole headlines about how children
were separated from their parents at the border and all this other stuff yeah my dad would have
been one of those kids he was 14 that's considered a child that's a child separated from their
parents you know picked up at the border but it's not 14 is not a child in other cultures 14 is a man
his dad was already dead yeah 14 is a man in mexico damn so when he's coming in it's not like
oh this is this this you know helpless child no this is just a young man they don't see it the
same way god i was such a bitch at 14. I was such a bitch.
I would have fucking been just sucking dick to cross the border the whole way.
Oh, my God. It would have been so bad.
Crazy.
Not because I'm Armenian.
Armenians are usually badasses at 14.
A disclaimer.
Just because I'm just a Berkeley pussy.
Go on.
But I've changed.
I'm not quite.
I'm not a total pussy anymore
Okay go on
Sorry
So 14 years old
And is your
Where's your grandmother now?
Where's your dad's mom?
She passed?
Dad's mom
Yeah my dad's mom died
In the 80s
She was 50
Did she make
Oh shit
Did she make it here
To the states too
Or no she stayed over there?
She made it
Oh okay
So she
She actually She Had him go by himself
and then he didn't know that she was already planning on coming
but she wanted him to go by himself to toughen him up and be a man wow Wow. So she let him, she let him go first. Then she had already planned on coming.
She just didn't tell him that. Wow. So he comes, he comes up, he's got a couple of cousins in LA
that he initially stayed with. Uh, but he didn't know that she was already planning on coming.
This was just her way of, you need you need to be a man
and so i'm going to let you go first rather than you tag along with us when we come up
in africa at 14 day uh if you're like it with the in some sort of african tribe they circumcise you
at 14 and the great country of mexico they send you across the border on your first solo mission
and in armenia i don't know what they do in armenia
in armenia you probably have to smoke a pack of cigarettes oh my goodness wow that is so hardcore
i wonder if your dad cried i wonder if when she told me he had to do it i mean can you imagine
wow even your mom at 14 to cross the border you already lost your dad
that's crazy but i guess he knew that there was a goal at least at least he had cousins here i mean
that's something i mean i know i'm trying to put like some positive fucking spin on it and then what
would be the and then okay so so he so he makes it here and he gets kicked out and he make he just
keeps coming and then finally he's here here how does someone like that eventually become like
oh he marries your mom and then he's legal?
And your parents are still together?
Yeah, 40, 42 years.
Wow, incredible.
So cool.
So I actually don't, I don't know what the whole process is on the in-between.
Because laws change and different things change.
So we had Jimmy Carter. So maybe maybe that was that's when it was and a big a big part of that was so a little california
history we used to have the bracerro program in california which ran after world war ii
spell bracerro for br spell bracerro c-e-r-o okayE-R-O. Okay.
So where a lot of this immigration stuff comes from is that we used to have cyclical migration in California because we got all this farmland.
So every year, like two to four hundred thousand Mexicans would come to the U.S., work in California and the West Coast.
Then they'd go back once the harvest is over. So the immigration laws changed. I think it was 65 they changed. And at 65, the cap from any
country was 20,000. So in California, one year, you got 200,000 Mexicans coming over the border.
They're totally legal.
The next year, those same group of people come to California,
but 180,000 of them are illegal and 20,000 are legal.
Because it's people in Washington, D.C. setting these rules and not providing businesses the resources they need to function.
In California, everyone's like, well, we don't care.
We need someone to come harvest these strawberries.
Right, right, right.
So that's where all the illegal Mexican immigration starts.
Because in California, they're not coming here for nothing.
Everyone comes here for work.
So that ended
and so my dad came here in 70 and 70 wasn't it crazy by the way i was just on that dot gov site
they've changed latin to latinx that's nonsense fucking wackado. He comes here in 70.
And in 70,
there wasn't the spin
on immigration that there is now.
They're just like, hey man,
we need someone to come in here and harvest
this.
So they would, I mean, they pick people
up and deport them and other stuff like that. But it's not like
it is today where there's all this other stuff attached to it.
Most people don't even know where all this starts at.
And if you leave California or if you leave the West Coast, you go to the East Coast, like Latin means a lot of different things.
Here on the West Coast, Latin is synonymous with Mexican.
The vast majority of people on the West coast are Mexican.
So I want to take credit for that.
I really do.
I think I deserve credit for that.
So like back then that was a, that was a different time.
And it's just, you come here, you want to work.
Here you go.
Hey, is this a term?
Is this a term, black scent?
Black scent?
Is that okay to use that one?
I don't want to get canceled.
Canceled black scent.
Black scent.
Oh, man.
I know. What do you think man two hours and 45 minutes holy fuck do you have to pee graciano i'm getting there i actually got a i got an appointment in 15
minutes oh you asshole um okay one the final topic, five minutes.
What was it like meeting Dave when he came to your gym?
Why did he come to your gym?
And why were you vocal on your Instagram about his departure?
So three questions.
Why did he come to your gym?
What was it like meeting him?
You guys, I suspect you're not a very talkative guy.
And he's definitely not a talkative
guy. I'm wondering what that encounter must've been kind of weird.
Like you guys just grunted at each other, did a workout and he left,
did a few bar muscle ups and he left.
It was a little brief because we didn't have a class. Okay.
So he was going to go duck hunting and then drop into a class, but this is,
Oh yeah. The billionaire's duck hunting club.
Did he tell you who he's going duck hunting with? Uh-uh.
Yeah, just fucking like the richest – speaking of Mexican labor, some of the richest farmers in California.
Anyway, another story. The kind of wealth out here is unfathomable to some people.
Yeah, G5 farmers. G5 farmers.
farmers g5 farmers some of the some of the stuff out here
people don't even comprehend
because they just
see a bunch of country bumpkins or
this guy has jeans and these dirty boots
on but meanwhile he's providing
watermelons to fucking the
entire planet
fuck
so we actually didn't have a class because this is
like the day this is like the day.
This is like around new year's holidays.
So he just came in.
He asked us about some stuff.
He asked us about our level program.
He asked us a bunch of stuff like that.
And then that's the 50 to one program that I saw on your Instagram.
No,
for the gym,
we have this,
we,
it was athletic level program.
Now it's a wellness program.
Oh,
okay. Okay.
Yeah. I've seen that
too okay that'll be another podcast okay so we had we had that he asked us questions and stuff
about that and then um he left and that was about it he was only here for 10 minutes or so
but did you enjoy his company was he polite polite? Was he interrogating? What was he like? No, he was polite. He's just to the point.
Yeah.
You know what? I don't think, I don't know. I don't know if he's, he may not be a small talker, but he's very just to the point.
Yeah.
So with people like that, it's easy to talk with them for a long time because there's kind of an understanding of like hey we
don't have to do this pleasantry thing we don't have to do this whole like hazard day and how's
this and all this surface level you can just get right to the point ask the question that you that
you want to ask you don't have to you just as long as you're respectful about it you don't have to
sugarcoat it and all this other stuff so we we have plenty of to talk about because
it doesn't feel weird asking a question.
And if someone asks a question
that I'm actually interested in, I don't have a problem
explaining it.
It's just not a big old
fluff sandwich of all this stuff that no one
really cares about.
You don't make each other feel better.
So
on Instagram,
for instance, when people started coming out bashing Dave,
people need to comprehend that's the last OG.
That's it.
And for all the affiliates who have gone through some of these changes,
Dave kept the originality of CrossFit.
Dave was that symbol that, hey, we're going to stick true to these old school values
this old school fitness in a hundred words and that the mission
is to combat chronic disease that was always
you know the rallying cry for CrossFit you as an
affiliate owner you're on the front lines you make a difference in your community
battling chronic disease and adding years to people's life and adding quality to those years.
And then without Dave there, you get rid of that message.
Now the whole message is profit.
Your gym is there to make money and HQ is here to make money, which the customer of HQ is primarily the affiliates.
So it's, hey, we're going to squeeze more money out of the affiliates.
Hopefully the affiliates go and squeeze money out of the community, but we are sacrificing the long-term survivability of CrossFit by showing up every day, doing what's right, making a difference in the community for short-term profit. And that
is where CrossFit would have never gone away under different leadership. Because if you're really doing
what's right and you're really making a difference in the community and you can make enough money to
support your family, that business is going to be around forever. And what's best for our society
is having lots of these gyms around for 20, 30, 50 plus years, always making a difference.
Having one spot in your town that you can go, you're
surrounded by people that care about their health. You're surrounded by people that are going to help
you out and tell you the truth rather than letting CrossFit turn into another Orange Theory or
another Jazzercise or whatever other fitness program that has come around, made a ton of
money in the short term, and then we don't hear about him anymore.
So that's where firing Dave sends that message pretty clearly.
Like this is just completely forget about what you knew of CrossFit prior to 2020.
This is a new brand with the same name.
I want to really, really drive home what Graziano said.
And there's nothing wrong with making money.
There's nothing wrong with making a shit ton of money.
But I wanted to show you something.
There used to be something called CrossFit Health.
And basically it was paid for by the affiliates.
Greg would take all your fucking affiliate money and he would invite all these doctors.
He would give free L1s to doctors
to slowly make them realize
that the CrossFit methodology is the
way to health. And it was to bring in all these doctors from around the world and top scientists,
top, top, top. I'm not talking about these fucking Instagram scientists. I'm talking about the real
deals. And, uh, and he would bring them in and they would talk about the ills of modern medicine.
And so CrossFit helps was a massive, massive financial drain on CrossFit because it was just
bringing, it was just bringing,
it was basically just building this library of videos and content information for the affiliates
and for the world to slowly,
at the tip of the spear of the intellect,
show that like, hey, doctors and medicine
does not have the cure
for the world's most vexing problem.
And it was building, building.
These are the real influencers,
not this bullshit Instagram, social media stuff are the real influencers, not this bullshit Instagram, social media stuff.
The real influencers, doctors, scientists on the highest level.
And they were all getting on the same page.
And so it was all about telling the world, yes, showing how pharma manipulates data, showing how sugar is at the root of almost every single chronic disease, all these things.
Now, CrossFit Health – and that was under a a woman named karen
thompson ran crossfit health now now and greg would have never tolerated someone like julie
fouché in there not in a fucking million years not in a million years now i believe crossfit
health is being run by julie fouch, and it's a money-making machine.
It's inviting the wolf, the fox, into the hen house.
And that's a perfect example of what Graziano is saying. This was something that cost CrossFit a ton of money to show the world that actually 86% of all of our woes and our medical costs um could be cured in the affiliate by speaking to
the people the smartest people in the room now it's it's it's become this superficial just like
it's just another it's just another branch of the company that's trying to figure out how to make
money off the affiliates through precision care selling them supplements i mean it's just i don't
understand how people don't see that and i'm not saying that something's wrong with it i'm not
passing judgment on it i'm just letting you know that yes what graciano is saying with dave gone that flip will is going
to happen even faster with less transparency and with more double talk they will they're not even
going to admit to you that this is happening we're not saying it's a bad or good thing we're
trying to explain to you what's happening is that is that fair that's fair the issue when we talk
about profit,
because I'm not saying affiliates should be doing charity work. They should be making money.
Yeah. It should be 200 bucks a month. Yes. They should be making a very good living.
The question is in the future, like if you're in a town, as for the affiliate owner,
you need to continue adding extra value for people because eventually you run out of people that are going to set foot in the gym.
Once CrossFit catches fire in a place where it's like, okay, you got all these people coming in the door when you first open your doors.
And you can sell these people BS and make a lot of money very quickly.
But at some point, two, three years down the road, these people need to continue seeing benefits. They need to continue getting fitter. They need to continue getting healthier. There needs to be people that show up and be like, hey, I've been here for 10 years and I'm in incredible health. You have to keep delivering value. You need to add more value to your current customers rather than relying on just keeping people coming in.
your current customers rather than relying on just keeping people coming in. Eventually, you're going to run out of people coming in. And when we get to that, or at a minimum,
that's going to slow down. And you're only going to have a certain number of people
that are going to start CrossFit for the first time. So how are you adding value to those
current customers? How can you take someone they've never exercised before and they're continuing to make progress for the next 10 years?
When we say that they're profit first, it's not overall profit or it's not long-term profit or how likely is CrossFit to survive.
They're trading off all those things for short-term profit because
CrossFit is now owned by a private equity fund. And when you're only thinking in finances,
you're thinking we bought CrossFit. How do we squeeze as much money out of CrossFit in the
shortest amount of time possible? Because we don't give a shit about CrossFit. Once we've
squeezed all the money we can in the shortest amount of time possible, we're going to take
that money and we're going to put that into a new investment.
We don't give a shit what happens to CrossFit.
We pull out in five years.
So that's what needs to be understood.
No judgment either.
No judgment.
Graciano's just stating the facts.
No judgment.
Not good.
Not bad.
Just is the way it is.
You have to understand that.
So as an owner or as an athlete, you need to understand that and know that lets you know what's going on yeah you can it's not
about it you agree with it or disagree or you want it to go a certain direction you first have to
assess this is what it is then you can respond to it and that is that is as simple as it gets
they want to squeeze all the money
they can in the shortest amount of time possible. Then they're going to take that. And what happens
to CrossFit afterwards, not their problem. Ladies and gentlemen, for the last three hours,
you've heard Graciano Rubio tried to get in a word edgewise while I talk. It's always,
it takes a strong man of his stature
and strength and capability to be able to squeeze words in. If he was five pounds weaker, he would
have not been able to say anything. What we learned today is that he has an intimate knowledge with
health and fitness. He's extremely articulate. His wife's hot. And he's had, his life has not
been easy. He's earned everything he's gotten and comes from a long pedigree of people who've worked hard to wherever they've gotten.
He owns CrossFit Valley View.
He's in the Central Valley of California, right?
Correct.
And it was a great three hours, and I never even had to get up and take a bathroom break, which is fucking remarkable.
I'm going to buy a lotto ticket.
Thanks for being on, Graciano.
Graciano, great stuff, man.
I appreciate it.